Directors lack of repsonsibilty

A few months ago Cadbury's was fined about one million pounds for Health & Safety failures. This seems like a lot of money but to a company the size of Cadbury's it is chicken feed. The trouble is that it costs those who are responsible nothing. Somebody took decisions which cuased the salmonella outbreak but they are not fined. In a company the size of Cadbury's the difficulty of identfying the individuals and the cahin of command that cuased the errors is far to complex and would for anyone outside the company would be far too difficult. We saw a similar sitaution many years ago when the Herald of Free Enterprise sank.

One proposal would be to make the directors responsible for paying any fines, ultimately they run the company and when it does well they like to take the praise, however when things go wrong it is never their fault. Thus by giving them this responsibility they might take their duty of care more seriously, especially non-executive directors who just seem to be on a gravy train. When things go wrong they never seem to know what was going on and were misled. Surely they are their to make sure that they know what is going on and keep the executive directors on their toes.

To keep things in perspective, a fine of one million pounds share amongst the directors, given their pay levels, would not hurt them too much but might make them think twice about what goes on in their companies and not see them just as a gravy train to be milked for money till they go bust or can be sold.

We do seem to live in a world where people are more & more unwilling to take respnsibilty for their decisions and perhaps we need as a society to reimpose the idea that when you get top jobs with top pay then a lot of respnsibility goes with it and when you screw up you take the pain and accept that it was your fault.