Prosecutions Register

Health and Safety Public Register of Convictions

The local authority enforces trading, licensing and public health legislation covering all aspects of consumer protection issues, rogue traders and food premises. In addition to this, the council also enforces anti-fraud legislation in relation to dishonest claims for benefit.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE)  (external link) publishes details of all prosecution cases taken by HSE, since 1 April 1999, which resulted in a conviction.

HSE enforces health and safety legislation for some industry sectors in the UK  - we cover factories, building sites, mines, farms, fairgrounds, quarries, railways, chemical plant, offshore and nuclear installations, schools, hospitals and other places where there is a work activity.

The site is updated on a weekly basis - and HSE has taken steps to ensure that cases subject to appeal are not published. To account for the appeals process and quality assurance, we allow 9 weeks to elapse after a conviction before a case is added. Where HSE is notified of an appeal outside this time period, the case will be removed from the database.

Inspectors normally enforce health and safety standards by giving advice on how to comply with the law. Sometimes the HSE must order people to make improvements and if necessary, prosecute them. Inspectors follow HSE's enforcement policy  (external link) to decide on the most appropriate action to take.

HSE prosecute companies and individuals for breaches of health and safety law. When they prosecute someone, they prepare a "Case" against them. The case may involve one or more instances when the defendant has failed to comply with health and safety law - each one of these is called a "Breach".

The sentences take into account a wide range of factors unique to the circumstances and context of the particular case and defendant, and there are no standard "tariffs" for health and safety offences.

The information in the Register is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 and any use of the information in contravention of that Act may result in a prosecution

To view the Health and Safety Public Register of Convictions vist the website at http://www.hse-databases.co.uk/prosecutions/  (external link)