Will the focus on building safety help the industry rewrite its tragic story?

摘要

I make no apology for addressing the topic of safety in this column for the second time in three months. In April's edition, we talked to victims of 2016's Didcot disaster about their agonising wait for answers to the question - 'what went wrong?' In this issue, our feature on page 32 discovers this case is far from unique. Data shows that the Health and Safety Executive takes more than a year to investigate around 20 per cent of fatal cases. Something is wrong with the current system, which is serving neither the bereaved nor the survivors of accidents. But it is also failing individual companies -whose reputations can hang under a cloud until matters are cleared up. It's impossible to solve a problem without knowing what it is. How can firms respond to incidents effectively in such an information vacuum?