Abstract
This chapter analyses and compares the relationship between the resources available and the enforcement policies used by occupational health and safety (OHS) institutions, and the political mechanisms to distribute these for enforcement activities. This chapter concludes that justice is expensive and that austerity policies leading to the erosion of funds needed for regulatory enforcement activities have caused a decriminalisation of OHS crime and, hence, injustice and inequality. This chapter also raises fundamental questions on whether enforcement institutions should be provided with enough resources to fulfil a constitutional obligation to achieve their statutory goals, such is the case in Italy, or whether these fundamental constitutional principles should not guarantee enforcement institutions' mandates, such is the case in Britain.
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Notes
- 1.
It is useful to note here that resources can be a relative concept, i.e. they are not infinite and enforcement institutions can always put more resources to good use.
- 2.
It is important to note that informal enforcement involves those actions concluding in informal or personal advice, while formal enforcement is when officers issue improvement or prohibition notices and prosecution. However, at the time of the interviews in England notices did not require firms to pay penalty fines. The only time when firms might have been penalised, either with fines or through employer imprisonment, is when firms were taken to court for prosecution. This has now changed with Fees For Intervention. Improvement and prohibition notices represent the formalisation of informal requests. Hence, until the Fees For Intervention was introduced the primary enforcement threat of prosecution to firms was when they were refusing to comply with improvement or prohibition notices, which a very rare occurrence.
- 3.
In a different context, one of the respondents argued that some counties register no notices in a whole year, which is very difficult to happen because, according to another respondent, in 99% of workplaces there are improvements to be made.
- 4.
Italian expression meaning ‘to be exhausted’.
- 5.
ISPESL, Superior Institute for Prevention and Work Safety, was founded as the Italian research centre for health and safety hazards and its practices were meant to offer information, expertise and support to health and safety inspectors. ISPESL was shut down in 2010 and responsibilities transferred to INAIL . The amount of help that ISPESL was offering to enforcement officers was criticised also in other interviews .
- 6.
Legal Decree 626 1994 (Repubblica Italiana 1994), which in 2008 was replaced by Legal Decree 81 2008, was the first regulation to introduce the goal setting philosophy in the health and safety Italian law in the same way the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 did in England.
- 7.
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Canciani, D. (2019). Enforcement Resources. In: The Politics and Practice of Occupational Health and Safety Law Enforcement. Critical Criminological Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98509-1_5
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