Making companies safe: what works?

This report attempts to answer two important questions about health and safety regulation. First, it considers whether, in trying to change the way companies and their senior officers conduct themselves in relation to health and safety, the Government should introduce new legislation; or whether instead it is just as effective for the Government to adopt voluntary codes of conduct, which have no legal basis and no capacity for outside enforcement. Second, in relation to the law that currently exists, it considers what techniques regulatory bodies should use to ensure that companies and other employers actually comply with it. It assesses whether compliance is best obtained through, on the one hand inspections and investigations with the threat of the imposition of formal enforcement notices and prosecution, or, on the other hand, through education and other forms of contact with duty holders in which regulators inform them about what they should do and encourage them to take action where necessary, but with no or little threat of actual enforcement. The report tries to answer these questions by undertaking a comprehensive review of the available published research and considers what the evidence tells us about the relative effectiveness of (a) the use of the "law" to obtain improvements in health and safety and (b) various regulatory techniques and approaches that exist to ensure companies comply with existing health and safety law