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The regulation of conduct via law is a key mechanism through which broader social meanings are negotiated and expressed. The use of regulatory tools to bring about desired outcomes reflects existing social and political understandings about¬ institutional legitimacy, the meanings attached to regulation, and the values it seeks to advance. But these contextual understandings are not static, and their evolution poses challenges for regulators, particularly when they reflect political framing processes. This paper shows how inspection has been reshaped as a tool within the United Kingdom’s health and safety system by changes in the meanings attached to the concept of ‘risk-based regulation’. While rates of inspection have fallen dramatically in recent years, the nature and quality of inspection have also been fundamentally reshaped via an increasingly procedural and economically-rational ‘risk-based’ policy context. This has had consequences for the transformative and symbolic value of inspection as a tool of regulatory practice.

This chapter explores the historical development of health and safety since the nineteenth century, including substantial analysis of the otherwise much-neglected post-1960 period. This includes identifying a movement from detailed specifications about standards to more open-ended duties to be performed to safeguard people’s safety and health. In addition, analysis suggests that the location of debate about health and safety shifts from the workplace to a more diffuse and public arena, entering high politics and ‘public opinion’ as a concern. It also identifies gaps in historical study, notably around gender and newer forms of employment.

This chapter focuses on the functional legitimacy of health and safety—how it derives acceptance from the ways in which it operates in practice, and the outcomes that it produces. The expansion of health and safety beyond the workplace, the emergence of a safety profession and the valorisation of expertise, and the inspection and enforcement practices of regulators, are all explored in relation to the challenges and benefits that they provide in terms of demonstrating the effectiveness, efficiency, and expertise of those who ‘do’ health and safety. The chapter argues that the common theme here is that of redrawing the balance of who is responsible for health and safety—something that can be heavily contested, become blurred, and be subject to external political pressures.

This chapter synthesises findings from a range of methodological approaches and sources relating to the nature and content of public attitudes towards health and safety. It argues that we should be cautious about accepting that there is any single, simple, public opinion towards health and safety; the attitudes that underlie these surface opinions are more subtle, complex, and contradictory than that, and reflect some core areas of ambiguity, misunderstanding, and lack of knowledge. While these attitudes are shown to have changed over time, the chapter concludes that there are few grounds for accepting the pessimistic accounts of public opinion presented within political and media discourses. A broad acceptance, or critical trust, in health and safety has endured, and offers a sound basis for future activity.

'Health and safety’ currently has an image problem in the UK. This article explores the origins of these current negative perceptions, framed around the concept of legitimacy – the degree to which a policy project of this sort is viewed as right, proper, and appropriate. The article considers and evaluates key moments in the growth and decline of social consensus around health and safety since 1960, including the Robens Committee and subsequent Health and Safety at Work etc Act, the decline of trade unionism, the extension of health and safety beyond the workplace, and the rise of the safety profession. It concludes that change has been much more subtle and less uniform than general perceptions might suggest, and makes recommendations for how public engagement with occupational health and safety might be restructured.

The last 20 years have seen the emergence of a popular climate of antipathy towards occupational health and safety regulation within the UK, particularly within the mainstream British media. The governance of health and safety has thus in recent years become an increasingly visible and contested public and political issue. The extent of this contestation, and its impact on the State’s governance of health and safety in the workplace and beyond, is explained and historicized within this chapter. Why has public rhetoric about health and safety apparently become so important in framing the ways in which the State could legitimately act in recent years? The chapter demonstrates how since 1960 the State remained a significant player – one among many, admittedly – and that while its roles in managing health and safety had long been bounded by a number of factors, a variable that emerged with particular saliency over the last 20 years has been a mediated notion of ‘public opinion’. This focus serves to remind us of the ways in which State action has at certain moments been pushed in particular directions by factors beyond formal mechanisms of rule.

The successful enforcement of health and safety regulation is reliant upon the ability of regulatory agencies to demonstrate the legitimacy of the system of regulatory controls. While 'big cases' are central to this process, there are also significant legitimatory implications associated with 'minor' cases, including media-reported tales of pettiness and heavy-handedness in the interpretation and enforcement of the law. The popular media regularly report stories of 'regulatory unreasonableness', and they can pass quickly into mainstream public knowledge. A story's appeal becomes more important than its factual veracity; they are a form of 'regulatory myth'. This paper discusses the implications of regulatory myths for health and safety regulators, and analyses their challenges for regulators, paying particular attention to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) which has made concerted efforts to address regulatory myths attaching to its activities. It will be shown that such stories constitute sustained normative challenges to the legitimacy of the regulator, and political challenges to the burgeoning regulatory state, because they reflect some of the key concerns of late-modern society.

This paper outlines and assesses the field for small-scale research within a government regulatory agency, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). The value and purpose of research within this sphere is considered, before the discussion looks specifically at the contribution that small-scale research projects can make to debates surrounding this area of legal activity. The methodological approaches taken in conducting regulatory research are discussed, with particular reference to a small-scale research project con ducted by the author, focusing on the process by which this research was conducted rather than the outcomes achieved. While the discussion relates

A significant body of literature has examined the role of public attitudes in shaping the contemporary politics of law and order, and suggested that a state of ‘populist punitiveness' now exists, whereby policy is made in response to harsh and punitive public attitudes towards crime issues. This paper will explore these issues within the context of regulatory and corporate offending. A qualitative investigation into public attitudes towards work-related fatality cases demonstrated that these cases are regarded as serious, but that attitudes regarding punishment in this context are only partially ‘punitive'. Demands for significant penalties are underpinned by rationality rather than a desire for revenge, casting into doubt the applicability of populist punitive accounts of lawmaking in this area.

The preceding two chapters have shown how systems of regulatory law that govern health and safety emerged as part of a broadly emancipatory rights-giving process, but were constrained from the start by the needs of the economic and political systems. This led to the emergence of a regulatory system that is instrumental in outlook, able to implement policy choices in pursuit of defined goals, but unable to demonstrate its own normative purpose because it has become disengaged from the social values that justify action in the public interest. This deficit has underpinned subsequent attempts to invoke the criminal law as a means of responding to work-related deaths. Criminal law offers a potential forum for moral adjudication, as it is notionally concerned with censuring conduct that is wrongful according to shared values; criminalisation is an attempt to restate the moral ‘reasons for’ regulating and has come to the fore at exactly the time when the broader political climate has turned against regulation. This chapter will explore the role and purpose of the new offence, in a practical and conceptual sense. The criminal law can play a role in re-establishing the reputation of health and safety regulation; this chapter will argue that this role can be understood in terms of a reframing of public debates in such a way as to allow for consideration of the balance between welfarist and economic considerations. Criminalisation has the capacity to validate regulation by providing a forum for moral accountability that enhances the legitimacy of the regulatory project.