Working for the ‘Free’ Market: state complicity in routine corporate harm in the United Kingdom

This paper documents two forms of harms which are not ‘dramatic’, in fact, each is very low level, and each represents an instance of routine, normalized forms of harm which emanate from the business sector, and in the production of which the state is complicit. The focus specifically here is, in the first substantial section of the paper, on the economic harms produced by the retail sector of the UK financial services industry and, in the second, on the level and scale of airborne pollution in the UK from a range of business sources. While they are very different, they in fact have a lot in common, and tell us a lot about business and state practices. The remainder of the paper considers these state practices at length: despite misunderstandings and claims that governments are withdrawing from free markets, what one finds is a torrent of state intervention designed to create conditions of non-interventionism. It is no mere bystander to these harms, but intimately complicit in them through, variously, deregulation, reregulation and non-enforcement of law... Such state practices are documented in the third part of the paper, which focuses on what is termed regulatory re-shaping by central Governments in the UK since 1997. The results of such state activity may render such harms more likely, even more normalized. In conclusion, the paper considers briefly the relationship between rendering such harms visible and effective resistance to them

A crisis of enforcement: the decriminalisation of death and injury at work

Fatalities and injuries caused through work are far more prevalent than the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) currently reports. For example, they fi nd that more than 80 per cent of officially recorded work-related fatalities are fi ltered out from the HSE’s headline figure and remain buried in other categories in the official data. The official data made available by HSE reporting methodology may thus only serve to mask the true quantity and quality of harm that takes place during work processes. After re-assessing the scale of the harms caused, Tombs and Whyte conclude that being a victim of a work-related fatality or injury is far more likely than experiencing conventionally defi ned and measured violence and homicide. While such siphoning seems an inevitable and inherent characteristic of legal and regulatory systems, this briefi ng suggests that it may be only through the acknowledgement of ‘safety crime’ by agencies such as the Home Office, the police, the courts and the Scottish Government that safety crimes can be recast as ‘real’ crime and thus dealt with more appropriately. The authors’ conclusion, that most safety crimes are either undetected or filtered out from offi cial channels of resolution, begs the question whether burdens have been displaced to employees and members of the public

Triennial Review of the Health and Safety Executive. Submission to the Department for Work and Pensions

In this response we have chosen not to address the guided questions specifically, but rather to respond to the general coverage of the document, not least that set out at Annex E, “Background to the Health and Safety Executive”, where it is stated that: HSE’s functions are undertaken in the pursuit of four headline aims that support delivery of its mission. These aims, set out in the HSE’s Business Plan for 2012-15, are to: Lead others to improve health and safety in the workplace; Provide an effective regulatory framework; Secure compliance with the law; and, Reduce the likelihood of low frequency, high-impact catastrophic incidents. (Department for Work & Pensions, 2013: Annex E, 14) Our response addresses many of the claims made in that Annex regarding enforcement and inspection. We welcome this review of the HSE since, as the evidence set out in this response demonstrates, it is clear that the regulator is increasingly unfit for purpose. It is presently unable to provide either minimal inspection coverage or a credible threat of enforcement, and is therefore in no position to secure compliance with the law

Trabajando para el mercado “libre”: complicidad estatal en la rutina del daño corporativo en el Reino Unido (Working for the ‘Free’ Market: state complicity in routine corporate harm in the United Kingdom)

This paper documents two forms of harms which are not ‘dramatic’, in fact, each is very low level, and each represents an instance of routine, normalized forms of harm which emanate from the business sector, and in the production of which the state is complicit. The focus specifically here is, in the first substantial section of the paper, on the economic harms produced by the retail sector of the UK financial services industry and, in the second, on the level and scale of airborne pollution in the UK from a range of business sources. While they are very different, they in fact have a lot in common, and tell us a lot about business and state practices. The remainder of the paper considers these state practices at length: despite misunderstandings and claims that governments are withdrawing from free markets, what one finds is a torrent of state intervention designed to create conditions of non-interventionism. It is no mere bystander to these harms, but intimately complicit in them through, variously, deregulation, reregulation and non-enforcement of law... Such state practices are documented in the third part of the paper, which focuses on what is termed regulatory re-shaping by central Governments in the UK since 1997. The results of such state activity may render such harms more likely, even more normalized.  In conclusion, the paper considers briefly the relationship between rendering such harms visible and effective resistance to them.Este trabajo documenta dos formas de daño que, sin tener efectos dramáticos -de hecho, ambos comportan en sí mismos un bajo nivel de afectación directa -  representan un ejemplos de las rutinas dañosas normalizadas que emanan del sector de los negocios, en la producción de las cuales el estado es cómplice. En la primera parte del artículo, el foco específico lo ponemos en los daños económicos producidos por la industria financiera minorista del Reino Unido y en la segunda, sobre el nivel y la escala de contaminación aérea producida por un amplio rango de negocios. Aun cuando ambos son muy diferentes, tienen verdaderamente muchas cosas en común, y son suficientemente demostrativos de cómo son esas prácticas del sector comercial y del estado. El conjunto de este trabajo considera las prácticas estatales en toda su amplitud: más allá de los malos entendidos y los reclamos que sostienen que los gobiernos se están retirando de los mercados libres, lo que encontramos es un torrente de intervenciones estatales dirigidas a crear condiciones de no-intervención. No se trata sólo de que el estado sea un mero espectador frente a esos daños, sino de la complicidad íntima en ellos, mediante desregulaciones, nuevas regulaciones y falta de herramientas efectivas de aplicación de la ley. Las prácticas estatales están descritas en la tercera parte de este trabajo, que se focaliza en el llamado re-diseño regulatorio que los gobiernos centrales en el Reino Unido llevaron adelante desde 1997. Como resultante de esta actividad estatal es que esos daños sociales se hacen posibles, e incluso se los normalizan. En conclusión, este artículo aclara resumidamente las relaciones entre la visibilización de estos daños y la efectiva resistencia contra ellos

Grenfell: the unfolding dimensions of social harm

In the first hour of 14th June, 2017 a fire broke out in Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey tower block on the Lancaster West estate in North Kensington, west London. The fire killed at least 72 people. It seems very likely that the acts and omissions which produced the fire will ultimately lead to some form of criminal prosecutions, perhaps of organisations, of individuals, or both, whether under fire or health and safety legislation or, indeed, the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act. However, irrespective of whether or not the fire was a crime, we can draw upon the ‘social harm’ perspective to clearly identify a whole series of harms which both produced, and then were generated by, it. While the lens of ‘crime’ all-too-often restricts us to a ‘snapshot’ of an intentional act or acts, a social harm perspective allows us to incorporate omissions, decision and non-decisions taken, policies developed, defended and implemented, and practices and cultures established, over long periods of time – so that we can them think of these in combination in terms of conditions, states of affairs, incubating phenomena and triggering events, and chains of processes. These are relatively familiar arguments ‘for’ a social harm approach. But a novel contribution of this paper, and the organising logic of what follows, is to indicate the ability of a social harm lens to capture the range of harmful consequences that follow from any specific event; to capture the various dimensions of social harms; to explore how these unfold; to note that these unfold in ripples, initially and perhaps most intensely within a specific time and place – here, a burning tower – but then disperse geographically and longitudinally. Further, these harms do not exist nor unfold in a discrete sense – they are layered, they interact - often complexly – thus producing new or heightened levels of harm through their synergistic effects. In a sense, this paper is also an attempt to begin to think about ‘how harm works’

Financial Harm and Victimisation

In the past 30 years, consumers of financial services firms have been victims of three major waves of offences in the UK. First, the gradual withdrawal of the Conservative government from pension provision, coupled with deregulation of the retail financial services sector in the latter half of the 1980s, created the conditions for a wave of pensions mis-selling. Companies launcehed into a hard sell, wrongly advising many clients to cash in their existing pensions contributions and transfer them to new, private schemes about which they received false information. One survey conducted by the Securities and Investments Board found that only 9% of pensions companies had complied with legal requirements when originally advising on these pensions transfers. Meanwhile, although breaches had first been uncovered in 1990, a KPMG survey of pensions advice given during 1991-93 revealed that in "four out of five cases", pensions companies were still giving advice short of legal standards (Slapper and Tombs, 1999, p 63). Early in 1998, the then new regulatory body, the Financial Services Authority (since 2012, the Financial Conduct Authority), estimated the final costs of mis-selling as around £11 billion, with some 2.4 million victims

State-Corporate Crime and Harm

The term "state-corporate crime" first appeared in 1990, when Kramer and Michalowski (2006, p 15) defined this phenomenon as signifying "illegal or socially injurious actions that occur when one or more institutions of political governance pursue a goal in direct co-operation with one or more institutions of economic production and distribution". For Michalowski, Kramer and other scholars, state-corporate crime and harm can be initiated and facilitated by states. Thus, corporations engage in illegality at the prompt, or with the approval, of state institutions, while state actors fail to prevent or respond to, or, indeed, collude with, such illegality. More recently, Lasslett (2010, para 4) has usefully expanded upon this concept thus: "Corporate-initiated state crime occurs when corporations directly employ their economic power to coerce states into taking deviant actions". "Corporate-facilitated state crime" occurs"hen corporations either provide the means for state's criminality (e.g. weapons sales), or when they fail to alert the domestic/international community to the state's criminality, because these deviant practices directly/indirectly benefit the corporation concerned" (Lasslett, 2010, para 4). These are important conceptual developments in the study of the crimes of the powerful

Social Harm

Some scholars - notably, in and around what is known as "critical criminology" - have argued that a disciplinary approach organised around a concept of "social harm" may be more theoretically coherent and more progressive politically than a discipline organised around the state-defined notion of crime. An early statement of this approach, drawing on sporadic but longer-term work in and around criminology, can be found in Hillyard et al (2004). Herein, a social harm approach was considered in theoretical and methodological terms, and applied to a broad range of areas of social life, from migration to murder, violence and victimisation

A deadly consensus: worker safety and regulatory degradation under New Labour

This paper documents the vulnerability of the UK workplace safety regime to ‘regulatory degradation’. Following a brief overview of this regime, the paper examines the dominant arguments within academic literature on appropriate and feasible regulatory enforcement, arguing that the approaches to regulation thereby advocated have been easily degraded as a result of their compatibility with neo-liberal economic strategy. A subsequent analysis of empirical trends within safety enforcement reveals a virtual collapse of formal enforcement, as political and resource pressures have taken their toll on the regulatory authority. Finally, the paper indicates that the increasing impunity with which employers can kill and injure is particularly problematic as we enter sustained economic recession, and underlines the urgent need for regulatory alternatives