Work and Enterprise Panel 2

Business Survey

This report provided information on UK business attitudes, intentions and performance relating to health and safety in the workplace in 2007.

In addition, it provided robust empirical evidence concerning linkages and impacts of health and safety strategy and expenditure on an array of hard and soft performance measures of intermediate and final business performance.

It also considered how health and safety issues interact with key strategic decisions in other core business areas to achieve the greatest impact on observable performance.

The key finding was that a composite strategy index, encompassing strategic decisions across managerial functions, including health and safety, was found to be associated with higher productivity. This was taken to be evidence consistent with the hypothesis that bundling of complementary strategies has a greater impact on performance than individual, un-coordinated strategic decision-making.

The fact that health and safety strategies formed a large component of the composite strategy index implies that businesses that co-ordinate and align health and safety strategy with other core business strategies will tend to be associated with superior performance.