Why Safety Compliance Sucks

Written on February 14, 2012 by Marie-Claire Ross

Back in 1996, Donald J Eckenfelder wrote in Values-Driven Safety, that the American safety body, OSHA, mostly works through fear. It’s regulation based and requires compliance or else sanctions are applied.

He stated that regulatory leadership is based on compliance statistics, not performance improvement. These statistics measure safety after the fact and are not a true representation of how companies are performing on safety in real time. Audits simply measure the regulatory process and are largely obsolete. Lawyers and other regulatory bodies mask the real problems. Often subverting serious prevention efforts by overwhelming everyone with largely irrelevant information.

Recently, in 2012, the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, proclaimed in an article in The London Evening Standard that “Every day they (small businesses) battle against a tide of risk assessment forms and face the fear of being sued for massive sums. The financial cost of this culture runs into the billions each year. Harder to calculate is the cost in terms of attitude: the way it saps personal responsibility and drains enterprise. Building our economy up to strength requires a real pioneering, risk-taking spirit – and today we are smothering it in bubble wrap and red tape. This must stop.”

And he’s right (sort of). READ MORE…………