Shock 23% fall in level of safety fines

Judges and magistrates have been told to stop treating safety offences like parking fines after a Health & Safety Executive (HSE) report revealed that the average level of fines for safety offences on construction sites fell by 23% last year.
"The judiciary needs to be taken by the shoulders and given a good shake," said George Brumwell, general secretary of UCATT and a member of the Health & Safety Commission.
"This is all about the value that society places on the lives of workers that build the country in which we live. The judges are not reflecting the seriousness of the injuries to and deaths of building workers."
TGWU national secretary Bob Blackman said: "The government will have to introduce minimum fines. The level of fines was already laughable. Now they are a complete joke. They are not a deterrent."
The HSE report said the average fine for construction offences prosecuted in 2002/03 was £5,698, compared with £7,450 in the previous year.
Across all industry, the average fine for offences prosecuted fell by 27% to £6,040. In the extractive industries, the average fine was down by as much as 48%.
HSE director general Timothy Walker said: "It is incomprehensible that fines for especially serious big company breaches in health and safety are only a small percentage of those fines handed down for breaches of financial services in similarly large firms.
"I understand that financial service breaches can affect people's wealth and well being. But breaches in health and safety can, and do, result in a loss of limbs, livelihoods and lives."
He added: "We said last year that we hoped the increase in last year's fines was the start of an upward trend. But this has sadly not been the case."
The HSE report revealed a 15% drop in the total number of safety prosecutions last year. In construction there were 604 prosecutions compared with 606 in the previous year. In 1999/2000 there were 782 construction prosecutions.
At the same time, the number of enforcement notices in construction last year was up by a fifth and the number of immediate prohibition notices rose by 25% to 2,756.
A Construction Confederation spokesman said: "We have no problem with the level of fines being increased. Anything that raises the level of awareness of health and safety has got to be welcome.
"The size of the fine has to be appropriate to the size of com-pany. They have to hurt," he said.