Honorary Fellows of the Society
Below you will find a list of the Honorary fellows of the Society:
| Prof.R.N. Allan |
| Mr.A.J. Bourne |
| Mr.M.P. Cottam |
| Mr G Dalzell |
| Mr R Cox |
| Dr G B Guy |
| Mr.G. Hensley |
| Mr.H.F. Hopkins |
| Prof T.A. Kletz |
| Mr N. J. Locke |
| Right Hon. Lord Cullen |
| Dr.R.P. Pape |
| Mr R. Profit OBE, AFC |
| Mr.B.W. Robinson |
| Rev A. Smith |
| Dr.D.J. Smith |
Lord Cullen's Response on being made an Honorary Fellow
I am indeed highly honoured to be made a Fellow of this Society, and I thank you for this distinction.
During the last 16 years since I became a judge I have the unusual experience of spending a good deal of my time - getting on for about a quarter of the total - chairing a public inquiry. I should, perhaps, say - lest you get the wrong idea - that I am not a safety expert. After each of my reports was presented I returned to my normal work, latterly at the level of the appeal court, and, since November of last year, as the head of Scotland's supreme courts. An inquiry chairman cannot prolong his function beyond the point when he has handed over his report. So I had no responsibility for carrying forward what I said in my report. Because of this it has on occasions come as a bit of a surprise for me to discover, some time after the event, what people have been saying about one of my reports!
Bringing home responsibility for safety
One of the questions which has recurred in my inquiries has been - how far can regulations be used to advance the interests of safety? I suppose you might say - trust a lawyer to go straight for the rule of law! However, there is more to the subject than that, since it opens up the issue of what helps to create and support a sense of responsibility for safety.
At one extreme, of course, regulations can be used to as the basis for invoking the criminal law to inflict sanctions on the transgressor. A recent report by the HSE on Health and Safety Offences and Penalties made it clear that it took the view that prosecution, along with penalties that reflect the gravity of offences, were an important lever in the target for the reduction of work-related injury and ill-health. The then Director General of the HSE observed that "sentences show what should not and cannot be tolerated in society". Now I see that there will always be the need for the use of what I might call the nuclear option to deal with bad cases. However, this does not of itself construct a positive and proactive attitude to the assessment and control of hazards.
Then there are regulations which set out what should be done to meet certain hazardous situations. Now there is no doubt that some regulations of that type are essential - for example, where it would be unthinkable that it should be otherwise. The idea of a regulation which tells you exactly what to do has considerable attractions: you know where you stand. But the danger is that it fosters an attitude of dependence on others to do the thinking in regard to safety. The risk is that this is seen as the be all and end all - the attitude that "it must be safe because everything that the regulations require has been done" - while situations not covered by the regulation may be neglected.
Hence the enactment of the principles expressed in sections 2-4 of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 and the development of goal-setting regulations, such as those which require the carrying out of risk assessment, whereas greater prescription is reserved for situations where this is unavoidable. The general idea behind a safety case regime - where the hazards make one appropriate - is very much the same. In my report on the Piper Alpha disaster I recommended regulations for offshore safety cases which would provide a framework within which it would be up to operators, first, to explain both to internal and external readers how they identified, assessed and controlled major hazards, and would deal with emergencies, specific to their installations, and, secondly, take the responsibility for being held to that.
This is a demanding approach to the regulation of safety. It requires a clear sighted and proactive approach to hazards and a regular review of the adequacy and relevance of systems and procedures. There is the possibility that the process for producing risk assessments and safety cases can become an end in itself, just a bureaucratic exercise. And might the end product merely sit upon the shelf?
This is where some parts of the evidence which I heard in the Ladbroke Grove Rail Inquiry may be of interest although the factual context was, of course, very different from the offshore scene. Martin Brown, Assistant Chief Inspector of Railways, observed that the use of outside consultants to produce railway safety cases was, in his words, "completely ineffective. I think if people do not actually do this process in-house and do not involve all parties in it, it will not work."
I see worker participation as being something like a core value. In a recent booklet on Directors' Responsibilities for Health and Safety the HSC said: "The best form of participation is a partnership for prevention, where workers and their representatives are involved in identifying and tackling potential or actual problems, rather than being consulted only after decisions have already been taken"
This approach leads not to dependence on others but a shared attitude of what I might call "interdependence."
A safety case should, of course, be a working part in the management of safety, and, of course, kept up to date for the purpose. And there is a further dimension: the safety case, again in the words of Martin Brown, is "a vehicle for communicating senior management's vision and strategy through the organisation and beyond" Seen in that light it can be a play a powerful part in the leadership in safety which should be given from the top.
So a regulation can be used to scourge. It can be used to direct what shall or shall not be done. But, above all, it can support the development of a positive and sustained commitment to safety.
Postscript
A few years ago my wife and paid a visit to Darjeeling which could only be reached by driving up a long, winding road from the plains. At each hairpin bend you could see a motto with advice for the safety of the passing motorists, assuming that they had time to take their eyes off the road! There was, for example: "If looking for survival, don't believe in fast arrival", "Drive in a hurry may cause family worry", "If you sleep, your family will weep", and so on. But there was one that particularly stuck in my mind as its authors had, probably without intending it, given a double meaning: "Excellence is never an accident". Now zero tolerance in accidents is an excellent thing. But it is also true that with safety, as with most things, the best does not come without positive commitment.