Not sure what your first paragraph has to do with the rest of your statement, or if you are referring to HSE inspectors or H&S professionals in general, so I will leave that one. The high rate of guilty pleas I would say is down to companies simply having good legal advice. H&S law is weighted against organisations that have accidents, it is up to them to prove they did everything reasonably practicable to prevent it; guilty until proven innocent. We also have decades of case law and an entire industry dedicated to defining and implementing best practice on H&S so the facts of most cases are very easy to determine. Lawyers can therefore be fairly confident once appraised of the full facts to give an opinion to their client as whether or not they are likely to be found guilty. If your own lawyer thinks you are then you'd be a bit daft to argue it in court and watch the fines and costs shoot up.

The opinion of the employer's insurer has no bearing whatsoever on any criminal proceedings!

Imagine that - insuring yourself against a criminal activity. Just bumping up the wife's policy as we speak, before fixing the electrics on the shower.

Quote. The UK HSE framework is built around theories such as bird and pearson whom believed and this belief was accepted by the HSE that all accidents are down to the failures of management. it doesn't believe that man has free will at work. RIDDOR figures for 2015/15 were 76,000 reported work related accidents - so the HSE and LA's took 76,000 prosecutions did they? Think there may be a few flaws in your argument Chris.

Chris, you seem to have mixed up criminal prosecutions (conducted by the HSE) and civil compensation claims (settled or defended on the instructions of insurers).

You might want to extend your research to cover terms such as 'vicarious liability' and 'respondeat superior.' I'm still not clear what point you're trying to make.

Assume you do mean to include Women as well in your statements? A good management system should include relevant staff (men and women) in the planning, and should not be written in isolation. Accident / Incident investigation should determine what went wrong and why. Human error should be factored in. It may be due to a fault in the management systems, but it may not.

If the meaning of this is that people should be held accountable for their own actions, and that therefore not everything is the fault of management, but could simply be a case of someone doing something clearly stupid, let alone in breach of procedures, then I fully agree. We often see cases where the company is prosecuted for something that is clearly the fault of the employee. Unfortunately, this evasion of personal responsibility is something endemic in modern society.

Exactly.

exactly they don't, all id like to see is more companies contest prosecutions. I truly believe the number of cases won by the HSE would be different and the same with civil lawyers fighting civil claims. We have to get out of the mindset of blaming management systems that we create and manage for every accident or we will simply be chasing our tails for the next 20 years.

"The HSE boast about an 84% success rate +/- in the courts for successful prosecutions but what they fail to inform is that roughly 80% of those cases accept guilty pleas before entering a court from instruction of insurance companies unwilling to fight a case" Definitely mixed up! Or can you explain what the insurance companies have to do with HSE prosecutions?

If management are not held accountable for breaches of legislation and accidents who is? From the regulator's perspective there is little value in pursuing individuals who may have been at fault. The employer is responsible for those employees who wilfully breach company policies and procedures and need to take appropriate action against offenders. There are exceptions of course where employees can be prosecuted under s7 HSWA or 36/37 but these are only in the extreme circumstances and usually for those is a position of influence i.e. supervisors and managers. Where a person's act or omission has caused a fatality there is the option of a non h&s prosecution i.e. gross negligent manslaughter.

Chris, this is a paper tiger. I don't know anybody who blames management system failures for every accident, I certainly don't. We just had an asbestos exposure, this was entirely due to somebody acting on their own initiative and with no reference to anybody or anything else. Not our fault, not a management system fault. I think the practitioner's skill is in knowing where the management system may have failed, and where it's got nothing to do with it, John

It could be because of several issues - falling attendance, changes in the mix of people attending the matches, general apathy etc. Sadly, the erosion of personal responsibiity starts at school. When I was young, if you got into trouble and were given the cane or slipper (ah, those were the days!), you kept quiet about it when you got home, as your parents would just tell you that you must have deserved it and you'd be in trouble at home as well. These days, teachers only have to shout at pupils and their parents are on to the school complaining, so the concept of discipline has been eroded, and children are not to be brought to book for their behaviour. Many homes don't instill a sense of boundaries to behaviour and personal responsibility. Then young people go to work, and discover that there are a multitude of ambulance chasing lawyers all too willing to take a case against someone else for your own stupidity. If anything bad happens, it's the management's fault, and health and safety only becomes important in many peoples' minds when something bad happens, then all of a sudden it's really important, and the management is to blame for bad health and safety when up to that point many employees disregarded the safety rules and got away with it. Or there again, I could be just cynical!