Regulating Supply Chains to Improve Health and Safety

The fragmentation of previously integrated systems of productionand service delivery has been an important feature of organisationalrestructuring over the last three decades. This article highlightsthe adverse implications of this development for the healthand safety of workers, examines the extent to which currentBritish health and safety law provides an adequate frameworkfor addressing these outcomes and explores whether its capacityto do so could be enhanced through the introduction of new statutoryprovisions on the regulation of supply chains. It concludesthat, in terms of both structure and operation, the presentframework of law is problematic. It further argues that recentinternational initiatives show that it is feasible to developsuch statutory provisions and that existing evidence suggeststhat provisions of this type could usefully be introduced inrespect of a number of areas of activity where the implicationsof the externalisation of production and service delivery seemparticularly problematic.