https://www.constructionenquirer.com/2018/04/23/contractors-fold-before-2m-site-death-fines/

Given the levels of fines under the current Sentencing Guidelines am I being cynical in seeing this as the start of a trend whereby smaller companies will simply shut up shop before the court case?

One in administration and the other in liquidation prior to sentencing.

Hmm, I used to monitor this sort of stuff. There used to be 2-3 companies a month folding just before court cases and the directors starting up new companies the same day. Its really interesting to look at dates, and officers and other companies they are directors of doing the same thing from the same address. Look up on companies house its easy. By far the biggest threat to our profession, a neat sidestep although in this case it appears a customer took them down. If you can get an HSE inspector off the record they will tell you its rife with notices as well.

If you are interested look up Phoenix companies in google. (Sorry any company with Phoenix in their title, clearly this is not aimed at you)

The whole phoenix thing isn't hard to do. I used to have a H&S services company which had something in the region of £250,000 in equipment assets at any one time. When setting it up I always wished I'd done it by setting up a separate company to own the equipment and then leasing it back to the main operating company. That way if the main company ever went bust the equipment would be owned by a different entity and could then be leased immediately to a new one to get going again. It would be a good hedge against a sudden downturn, or more likely, clients deciding not to pay their bills on time and hammering us on cashflow, but I guess it would have worked for prosecutions as well as it is difficult to pin a director down as personally liable for a failing, or the HSE would do it a lot more frequently. Thankfully I never had reason to regret not doing it, but we came very close during the 2009-10 recession and then a couple of years later where a client with a market capitalisation in the billions decided to use the money owed to small suppliers to smooth out its own cashflow problems and didn't pay us for nearly eight months, for a massive job accounting for nearly 20% of our turnover that year. In both those situations I was looking back wishing I'd set it up in such a way that a Phoenix company would have been possible, just in case. Saying 'target the owners of a business' sounds good but is very tricky. 'Owners' are the shareholders, not always the director(s), and in a lot of businesses, if it's hard to pin fault onto a director working within the company then it's going to be impossible to pin fault on more remote shareholders. Even if it's a smaller company and the only shareholder is the main director, it's still very hard for the HSE to get a strong enough case to prosecute them directly and history has shown the director has to do something fairly impressively bad to make the case against them work. After two decades in H&S I agree with the sentiment that I wish there was a way to hold directors and/or owners more to account, but in practice it's not going to work.