Regulatory Accountability, Strategic Control, and Leadership Intelligence

Executive Context

At board level, the question is no longer whether health and safety is a governance issue, but whether boards are governing it competently enough to discharge their legal and fiduciary duties.
UK regulation, enforcement practice, and recognised standards have converged on a clear position: health and safety risk must be directed, controlled, and assured at the same level as other principal risks.
Boards that treat health and safety as an operational or technical matter are not merely out of step with best practice; they are misaligned with regulatory expectation.

The Legal Architecture Boards Operate Within

UK health and safety law does not use the language of boards and executives by accident. It uses the language of control, management, and decision-making.

Key duties are embedded in:

• The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, which places duties on employers to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of employees and others affected by their undertaking. Where strategic decisions shape risk, accountability follows those decisions.
• The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, which require suitable and sufficient arrangements for planning, organising, controlling, monitoring, and reviewing preventive measures. This is, in substance, a governance framework.
• The enforcement approach of the Health and Safety Executive, which routinely identifies leadership failure, inadequate oversight, and weak assurance as root causes in serious incidents and prosecutions.

These duties are reinforced, not replaced by voluntary standards such as ISO 45001, which explicitly positions leadership accountability, integration with business strategy, and worker protection as inseparable.

The regulatory message is consistent: boards are expected to know whether their systems work, not merely whether they exist.

Health and Safety Failure Is a Governance Failure

Major incidents are rarely caused by the absence of procedures. They are caused by decisions taken higher up the organisation:

• Competing priorities that reward output over control
• Tolerance of known risks because nothing has happened yet
• Inadequate challenge when assurance is weak or ambiguous
• Over-reliance on lagging indicators that obscure systemic failure

These are not operational errors. They are failures of strategic oversight and governance discipline.

From a regulatory perspective, the question asked after serious harm is predictable:

“What did senior leaders know about the risk, and why did they allow it to persist?”

What Regulators Expect Boards to Be Able to Demonstrate

Boards are not expected to manage risk day-to-day. They are expected to govern it intelligently.

In well-governed organisations, boards can demonstrate:

1. Explicit Leadership Accountability

• Clear executive ownership of health and safety outcomes
• No ambiguity between advisory roles and accountable roles
• Formal recognition that leadership behaviour and decisions influence risk

2. Visibility of Principal Health and Safety Risks

• Regular reporting aligned to the organisation’s most material risks
• Focus on critical activities, contractors, change programmes, and non-routine work
• Inclusion of occupational health and long-term harm, not just acute injury

3. Robust Assurance, Not Paper Comfort

• Independent scrutiny of critical controls and management systems
• Evidence-based assurance that controls operate as intended
• Willingness to accept uncomfortable findings and act on them

4. Forward-Looking Risk Intelligence

• Use of leading indicators, not just incident statistics
• Insight into pressures created by workload, resourcing, and organisational change
• Early identification of weak signals before harm occurs

Where boards lack this visibility, regulators increasingly interpret that absence as a governance failing in itself.

Leadership Competence as a Preventive Control

A persistent weakness in many organisations is the assumption of competence at senior level.

From a regulatory standpoint, this assumption is dangerous.

Senior leaders:

• Set priorities that shape behaviour
• Approve strategies that alter risk exposure
• Influence whether safety is compromised under pressure

Regulators increasingly treat leadership understanding as a control measure. Where leaders cannot demonstrate basic literacy in the risks they oversee, enforcement outcomes tend to escalate.

Competence at board and executive level is therefore not about technical detail, it is about informed decision-making in the face of risk.

Alignment with Wider Corporate Governance Expectations

Health and safety governance does not sit outside mainstream corporate governance frameworks. It aligns directly with expectations on:

• Risk management and internal control
• Board effectiveness and challenge
• Organisational resilience and sustainability
• ESG credibility and social responsibility

This alignment mirrors the principles of the UK Corporate Governance Code, which emphasises accountability, risk oversight, and long-term value protection.

Boards that treat health and safety as peripheral undermine their own governance coherence.

Why Lagging Indicators Are Not Enough

One of the most common governance failures is over-reliance on:

• Injury frequency rates
• RIDDOR statistics
• Historical incident trends

These metrics describe harm after control has failed. They do not describe whether systems are under strain.

Regulators increasingly expect boards to interrogate:

• Whether risk is increasing even if incidents are not
• Whether assurance is based on observation or assumption
• Whether the organisation is learning before people are harmed

A low accident rate is not evidence of effective governance. It may be evidence of luck.

The Strategic Consequence of Weak Oversight

When serious incidents occur, post-event scrutiny almost always exposes:

• Diffused accountability at senior level
• Board detachment from operational reality
• Failure to act on known weaknesses
• Governance structures that prioritised reassurance over truth

At that point, compliance arguments carry little weight. Governance intent and leadership behaviour become central to regulatory judgement.

A Board-Level Imperative

Health and safety governance is fundamentally about how power, control, and accountability are exercised within an organisation.

Boards that lead effectively in this space:

• Prevent foreseeable harm
• Protect organisational value and legitimacy
• Demonstrate regulatory credibility
• Strengthen trust with workers, regulators, and stakeholders

Boards that do not are increasingly exposed, not because regulation has changed, but because expectations of leadership competence have caught up with reality.

By Dr. Constance Ehiozee DBA

Health, Safety and ESG Research Consultant Bureau Veritas Group (UK/Ireland)

🔗Registration is now open for The Health and Safety Event: Register Today.

🔔Stay up to date. Subscribe to Health Safety Digital Newsletter for news, insights, and updates from across the industry.