For directors
If you sit on the board, and barely have time for this. Five minutes.
No blame. No jargon. No pitch. The plain-English version of why the law puts safety on you personally — and what, on a busy week, you actually have to do.
The law, on you personally
Safety sits with the company. And, under section 37, with you.
Under section 37 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 (HSWA), if a corporate safety offence is committed with the consent, connivance, or neglect of a director, that director is personally guilty of the same offence.
“Neglect” is the part that matters most. It does not require intent. It requires only that you knew, or ought to have known, and did not act. Sentencing on a personal conviction can include unlimited fines and imprisonment.
The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 sits alongside it. The Sentencing Council guidelines for health-and-safety offences treat senior-management failure as a serious aggravating factor — a category routinely cited in seven-figure fines against organisations.
None of this is about catching directors out. It is about recognising that the people legally empowered to decide where money, time and attention go are also the people the law places responsibility on. That is the design, not the trap.
What "good" looks like
Five things, doable inside a normal board year.
The HSE’s own guidance for board members — INDG417 (Health and Safety Executive board-member guide, Leading Health and Safety at Work) — sets out the framework. Strip it back, and the things that genuinely move the dial at board level are these:
- Safety on every board agenda. Three minutes minimum. Not last item. Not when the time has gone.
- Sign off the safety strategy once a year. Read it before you sign it. Test the assumptions in it. Ask one uncomfortable question.
- Walk a site twice a year. Talk to the people doing the work. Listen more than you ask. Notice what they don’t say.
- See the data. Incidents, near-misses, sentinel events — by site, by sector, by repeat pattern. Not a colour. A list.
- Know who is genuinely competent to advise you. Internal, external — either is fine. Knowing the difference between qualified and confident is not optional.
And, just as honestly
It is also a commercial decision.
HSE data puts the average UK workplace injury at around £20,820 in direct costs, and a fatal incident in the millions before insurance, reputational and ESG-disclosure consequences are even counted.
The work that genuinely shifts safety performance at board level is rarely the expensive work. Most of it costs nothing more than three minutes of board attention, the right question asked of the right person, and a willingness to make a decision before something forces it.
That is the part nobody puts in the brochure. Get ahead of it, and most workplace risk is manageable, knowable, and quietly priced in. Wait for it, and you are no longer in control of the cost.
If this matters
Twenty minutes is enough to know whether we can help.
No pitch. No follow-up sequence. By the end we will both know whether there is something we can help with — and either way, you leave with at least one useful thing to take back to the board.
The workplace people walk into tomorrow is the one we decide on today.
Worth a few more minutes.
The duties, in plain English.
HSWA, MHSWR and the regulations beneath them — set out without the textbook.
How we think about the work.
Where we work, where we refer out, and the three things that drive what we do.
Twenty minutes, no pitch.
An honest conversation about what your board is carrying, in confidence.