Health and safety management

There is an increasing expectation on directors to take an active role in health and safety management. The HSE has issued guidance on directors’ responsibilities*, and the key aspects are outlined below.

Directors’ responsibilities for health and safety

HSE’s guidance focuses mainly on the health and safety responsibilities of company directors. It sets out the roles and responsibilities of the board for ensuring effective health and safety management. The guidance says that:

• the board needs to accept formally and publicly its collective role in providing health and safety leadership within the organisation
• each member of the board needs to accept their individual role in providing health and safety eadership
• the board needs to ensure that all board decisions reflect its health and safety intentions, as laid down in the health and safety policy statement
• the board needs to ensure that it is kept informed of, and alert to, relevant health and safety risk management issues.

HSE says that it is important that all directors, in carrying out their responsibilities, set out:

• their expectations of senior managers with health and safety responsibilities
• the arrangements for keeping the board advised of all relevant matters concerning performance.

Responsibilities of the board

Specifically, the HSE says that the board needs to:

• review health and safety performance regularly (at least annually)
• ensure that the health and safety policy statement reflects the board’s priorities. The statement should be considered at the same time as reviews of health and safety performance, or when circumstances (such as a new management structure) change
• ensure that a management system provides for effective risk assessment, and the monitoring and reporting of health and safety performance (periodic audits can provide information on this)
• be kept informed about any significant health and safety failures, and of the outcome of the investigations into their causes
• ensure that the health and safety implications of all decisions are taken into account.

The role of health and safety director

The Health and Safety Commission recommends that boards appoint one of their number as the ‘health and safety director’. Though this is not a legal requirement, it is good practice (in the event of any prosecutions or civil actions, following good practice is an important factor).

There are no legal minimum health and safety training qualifications for directors. The need for any training must be determined by directors on a case by case basis.

The health and safety director will be the focal point for health and safety, ensuring that the board, collectively, is discharging its responsibilities, and that health and safety issues are communicated throughout the organisation.

The health and safety responsibilities of all board members should be clearly laid down in the health and safety policy and arrangements. The role of the health and safety director should not detract either from the responsibilities of other directors for specific areas of health and safety management, or from the health and safety responsibilities of the board as a whole.

Legal requirements

Employers must ensure that they discharge their duties under the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974, while specific requirements within the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 include:

• assessing any work-related risks faced by employees, and by people not in their employment (notably contractors and the public)
• having effective arrangements in place for planning, organising, controlling, monitoring and reviewing preventive and protective measures
• appointing one or more competent persons to help undertake the measures needed to comply with health and safety law
• providing employees with comprehensible and relevant information on the risks they face and the measures that control those risks.

For more information on the principal legislation, you can access the health and safety legislation ‘information sheets’ on this website, and we recommend that you refer to HSE Codes of Practice and guidance.

Where a ‘body corporate’ commits a health and safety offence, and the offence was committed with the “consent or connivance of, or was attributable to any neglect on the part of, any director, manager, secretary or other similar officer of the body corporate” then that person (as well as the body corporate) can be prosecuted (s37 of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974).

*The reference for HSE’s guidance booklet on directors’ responsibilities is ‘INDG 343’. It is available free from HSE Books on 01787 881 165.