I see the job title of ‘Compliance Manager’ quite a bit these days. I don’t think that the over-emphasis on compliance is useful. 

The three main drivers for health and safety management are moral (ensuring people health, safety and welfare because it’s the right thing to do), financial (if you think managing health and safety is expensive, try an accident!) and legal (avoiding prosecution and/or compensation claims).

I think the most important driver is the moral one. If organisations managed their health and safety systems with the emphasis on the moral driver, rather than the legal one, if they managed as if they genuinely cared about their workers rather than the emphasis being compliance with legislation, the benefits would be exponential.

Compliance would then happen anyway, by default.