Regulating Work-Related Death — A History

As the previous chapters have demonstrated, work-related deaths have become important objects of legal regulation. This process has been piecemeal and shaped by context-specific considerations and events, including particular work-related deaths. This book aims to establish that the regulation of work-related ‘death’, as a specific component of the criminal law, is a distinctive contemporary development which reflects the socio-cultural limitations of established regulatory systems. This makes it necessary to explore where the sources of those limitations, and of this instrumentalism, lie within the history of safety regulation. This chapter will overview the development of safety regulation within the UK as a case-study, partly because safety regulation emerged there first but also because the UK has subsequently been the site of the most decisive contemporary development towards the use of criminal law as a regulatory tool. It will show that while much of the impetus towards the development of health and safety regulation was provided by welfarist political concerns, it was also a response to the needs of a free-market economic system. The regulatory system that was constructed succeeded in addressing these issues via centralised structures of oversight and control, but lacked the capacity to communicate effectively the normative reasons for regulating that underpinned it.