1.2 Regulating Health and Safety

What enforcement agencies do, and what follows non-compliance

Legislation is the legal backbone of worker protection, but it only works when governments back it with enforcement. Where enforcement is weak, some employers have little reason to take the rules seriously, and in many countries prosecutions of offending employers remain rare.

No single global standard exists for how health and safety law is enforced. Each country has one or more enforcement agencies, and their usual tasks are to:

• carry out workplace inspections
• give advice on health and safety matters
• investigate workplace accidents
• take formal action to make employers comply

When a person or organisation breaks the law, the agency can respond in three broad ways.

Preventive action. Powers and notice names depend on national law. In Great Britain, an improvement notice concerns a legal contravention and requires it to be remedied. A prohibition notice addresses a risk of serious personal injury and can take immediate effect, or be deferred where appropriate; an accident or emergency does not have to occur first. It prohibits the specified activity until the matters creating the risk are remedied. Breaching a notice can lead to prosecution.

Punitive action. The most obvious outcome is a fine. The organisation must also pay its own legal costs and, in many systems, those of the prosecution, so non-compliance is an expensive business. Individuals can be imprisoned for breaches. Even those who avoid prison live with a criminal record, which can limit the sectors they may work in and the countries they may visit.

Compensatory action. Depending on the country, further consequences may follow. The injured person faces pain and suffering, low morale, disruption to family life, lost wages or permanent disability. The employee may sue the employer and claim that the employer is to blame, or may be able to claim through a national or regional compensation scheme.

The part played by international standards such as ISO 45001

ISO 45001:2018 sets out the requirements for an occupational health and safety (OHS) management system and gives guidance on using it. Its aim is to let organisations provide safe, healthy workplaces by preventing work-related injury and ill health, and by improving OHS performance in a proactive way. In particular, ISO 45001:

• applies to any organisation, whatever its size, type or activities, and covers the OHS risks under the organisation's control, taking account of its context and of the needs and expectations of workers and other interested parties
• helps an organisation achieve the intended results of its OHS management system
• does not fix specific performance criteria, and does not dictate how the system must be designed
• lets an organisation bring other aspects of health and safety, such as worker wellbeing, into the same system
• does not deal with product safety, property damage or environmental impact, except where these create risks to workers or other relevant parties
• can be used in whole or in part to improve OHS management in a systematic way, although a claim of conformity is not acceptable unless every requirement has been built into the system and met without exclusion

A management system based on ISO 45001 helps an organisation improve its OHS performance by:

• creating and carrying out an OHS policy and objectives, and achieving them
• setting up systematic processes that consider its context, its risks and opportunities, and its legal and other requirements
• finding the hazards and OHS risks of its activities, then eliminating them or putting controls in place to reduce their effects
• establishing operational controls for its OHS risks and legal requirements
• raising awareness of OHS risks
• evaluating performance and taking suitable action to keep improving it
• making sure workers play an active part in OHS matters

The wider benefits of working to the standard include:

• better safety for individuals as well as for the organisation
• less downtime, lower incident costs and fewer insurance claims
• a higher return on investment
• more trust and brand strength, because the system has been shown to meet an international standard
• evidence of conformity within the scope assessed, where independent certification has actually been obtained
• confirmation of the organisation's capability, which gives confidence to potential business partners

Summary notes for Element 1 · Cheat sheet · Glossary. A study aid, not published or endorsed by NEBOSH.