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Jeannette Stock
Member - 3 posts
My Company has a Operational Board, a Company Board and a Holding Company Board. The Director in charge of H&S sits on both the Operational Board and the Company Board, our CEO sits on the Company Board and the Holdings Board. Could anyone advise me who is ultimately responsible.
Thank you for any advice.
Jeannette
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Mike Proudlove
Member - 5 posts
Hi Jeannette,
I attended the Workplace Law briefing at the IOD for Corporate manslaughter and found the day totally informative with many myths dispelled.
The new legislation is aimed primarily at organisations that have no regard for Health and Safety and at those who have significant or substantial failures within their culture - otherwise termed as serious poor perfomance.
Corporate Manslaughter is concerned with the corporate liability of the organisation itself and does not apply to individual directors, senior managers or other individuals - nor is it possible to convict an individual of assisting or encouraging any offence. Prosecutions under the legislation will be brought against the organisation itself and not specific individuals. There is no "go to jail card" under the new legislation - UNLESS it can be shown that the individual is directly responsible and guilty of gross negligence that had a direct link to the cause of an event to happen. However - this will come about under the benchmmark of the HSAWA 74 - section 37, - legal liability of individual board members for H&S failures. So - an individual may still be charged for manslaughter as In principle this legislation already exists.
A parent company cannot be convicted under the legislation due to failures within a subsidiary. Such companies within a group structure are separate legal entities. Duty of Care underpinning an offence are the responsibility more of the subsidiary rather than a parent.
Under any such legislation an organisation needs to be able to prove that its selected control measures are the best and most applicable that it could have implemented. Paperwork is useless unless you have designed and managed effective implementation. Under Individual failings - the legislation does not require to prove specific failings on the part of individual senior managers. It is sufficient that the senior management of the organisation COLLECTIVELY were not taking adequate care and this was a substantial part of the organisations failure. And strangely enough - when you ask the question of..."has the board actually brought in effective Health and Safety?" - as an individual the H&S Director is in the safest position.
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Jeannette Stock
Member - 3 posts
Thank you for this. Very helpful.
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