The fragmenting occupation of labour inspection and the degradation of regulatory and enforcement work inside the British state

Abstract

While union presence and joint regulation of work and employment has declined, the state maintains a key role in directly regulating employment standards in areas including health and safety, minimum wage enforcement and subcontracting. Based on an empirical study of enforcement agencies in Britain, this article argues that the nature of regulatory work and its reshaping by both exogenous and endogenous pressures ultimately influences the impact of regulation itself and how it is enforced. Major shifts in the skills, knowledge and networks critical to the nature of labour inspection work parallel developments within the workplaces they are responsible for regulating.

Introduction

Among the ways that the state shapes work and employment is the direct enforcement of some areas of employment regulation, as well as in its capacity as an employer. The state’s role in enforcing employment regulation has become increasingly significant in a context of decollectivised industrial relations (Howell, 2005). However the context, employment relationship and nature of work for public sector employees tasked with actually enforcing and implementing employment regulation is an area that has received relatively less attention. This article addresses this gap by exploring the impact of regulatory and organisational change on those actually working within the state agencies and functions responsible for direct enforcement of employment regulation. The employment relationship and restructuring in the public sector are highly influenced by political contingencies (Batstone et al., 1984) which impact on the nature of work for those employed within state agencies, but also have a wider influence on how the state directly enforces employment regulation. Rich empirical studies of lean production and work intensification in the civil service (Carter et al., 2013) and the impact of austerity and New Public Management within the NHS (Hyde et al., 2016) demonstrate how political priorities concerning spending reductions, the reorganisation of work and managerial regimes have a marked effect on the nature of employment within the public sector. These dynamics have been less commonly applied in the study of those working within state regulatory bodies, the nature of their work and subsequent regulatory outcomes. For example, Silbey (2011) conceptualises those employed in regulatory functions as ‘sociological citizens’, whose reflective, contextualised understanding of wider organisational networks and interests allows them to develop ‘relational regulation’ that engages with different organisational cultures and networks of actors (including employers, unions and other regulatory bodies) in order to develop coalitions to address regulatory aims and objectives. This article argues that these ‘sociological citizens’ are nonetheless workers engaged in a highly particular employment relationship framed by a breadth of endogenous and exogenous factors that determine the nature of their work and reflect the particular changes in terms of work and employment that inspectors are tasked with investigating and regulating. There is an increasing reorientation of the labour process of the labour inspectorate across issues related to job control, skills and their occupational identity due to these structural changes and reforms within the state. Additionally, it is argued that much of the literature on labour inspection and enforcement underestimates the level of political opposition within neoliberal systems of governance (and particularly within the form such systems of governance have taken in a context such as Britain) to state agencies engaging with unions, worker representatives and civil society. Networked, relational approaches are constrained by the rigid boundaries created between different organisations and those that work for them.

The analysis below draws on research focused on state agencies concerned with direct enforcement of employment regulation in Britain, including the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) and the HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) minimum wage enforcement function. Using analytical approaches drawing on the wider body of literature on public sector work and employment, as well as themes well established in the labour process tradition, the overarching research question informing the article asks: how has institutional and organisational change impacted on the occupational identity of inspectors, the nature of their work and employment relationship, and the subsequent framing and enactment of labour market regulation? This question is addressed through analysis of three main themes: the impact of austerity and changing state regulatory priorities concerning employment and immigration on the employment of inspectors; teamworking, networking and collaboration between different enforcement agencies and labour market actors; and notions of flexibility and deskilling and how they are manifested among public sector employees within regulatory agencies. Our findings resonate with studies elsewhere of changes in the public sector, but with wider implications for work and employment than some areas of state employment. Employees of these agencies are simultaneously tasked with shaping the nature of the wider labour market and its regulation. To understand questions of deregulation and changing labour market trends it is necessary to address the way work inside the state and how it changes – especially in those agencies directly concerned with regulation and enforcement – reflects and further impacts on such developments. Processes of deregulation and regulatory change may also impact on the internal functions and processes of the state itself to the extent that these changes further undermine the state’s ability to sustain specific labour standards and regulatory responsibilities.

Labour inspection, enforcement and change within state agencies

Much of the literature on the role of state agencies in regulating and enforcing employment rights focuses on comparisons of regulation in different national contexts, external pressures on enforcement functions and, to a lesser extent, organisational factors and culture within enforcement agencies and the impact they have on enforcement outcomes. A less commonly addressed issue is how the nature of labour inspectors’ work and their position as public employees are affected by these wider contextual variables, and the implications for regulatory outcomes of the employment relationship within inspectorates.

The enforcement capability of regulatory agencies has been argued to depend on three core factors: the ability to collect information on regulatory breaches, either from inspectors themselves, or individuals and civil society actors; to be able to process and act upon this information; and to ‘resist efforts by organised interests to block enforcement’ (Amengual, 2014: 7–8). Some key differences in terms of approaches to enforcement include more persuasive/accommodative approaches to labour inspection, where enforcement involves conciliatory, negotiated and educative approaches to securing compliance with regulation by employers, in contrast to more insistent/sanctioning approaches which have more of a punitive focus. Hutter’s (1989: 162–163) studies of environmental health officers note that organisational culture and peer group control meant that formal enforcement and prosecution were expected to be rare in terms of individual inspectors’ workloads, with the use of such methods deemed to be an admission of failure in terms of attempts to persuade employers to behave differently. Similarly, Piore (2011: 153) identifies four main approaches to enforcement activity: sanctioning and deterrence; pedagogical, where agencies seek to educate employers that breach regulations and improve their behaviour; conciliatory, where means of addressing regulatory breaches are negotiated with the organisations in question; and entrepreneurial, where inspectors have the capacity to develop innovative solutions with a relatively high degree of autonomy. These approaches are premised on the establishment of longer-term, stable relations within the regulatory and social contexts of regulatory work itself.

These approaches to the enforcement of regulation frame a curious combination of factors regarding the level of control over inspectors’ work, the level of skills and knowledge intrinsic to this work (and in relation to collaboration with different actors), and the occupational context within which it developed, which, in turn, sustained their autonomy and ability to intervene socially. In Britain, the socially oriented features of the Health and Safety Executive were not solely the outcome of the nature of health and safety legislation, but also arose from inspectors’ ability to sustain an element of control over their work; for example, through specific educational and training programmes that consisted of accumulating experience and focused insight in relation to specific industrial sectors and regions. Additionally, there were three important features that underpinned the role of the labour inspector.

First, the ability to develop a level of discretion within their decision-making process, with sensitivity to the specific contexts of the different workplaces in which they intervened, was central to inspectors’ implementation of health and safety objectives (see Rolfe, 1990, for an outline of the relation between complexity and discretion at work). The sheer complexity of health and safety issues and traditions across different industrial sectors is so extensive that an historic feature of labour inspection in the UK was the ability of inspectors to establish long-term relationships within particular industries. The specific hazards, levels of worker and management cognisance regarding them, and the structures of discussion and negotiation in each sector required significant technical knowledge (e.g. waste in the chemicals sector). Inspectors were able to use a wide degree of judgement and discretion due to the experience they had built up over the years in specific areas. To this extent they are ‘street-level bureaucrats’ who interact with citizens and other stakeholders directly and have discretion in their work to some degree (Lipsky, 1980). They are able to play an important intersection point between regulations, their enforcement and those who are affected by these regulations.

Second, this control over their work was also facilitated and underpinned by inspectors developing social and organisational networks that led to the development of specific forms of social and political capital among a range of employers and trade unions. One example that our data provided was how in the construction sector the health and safety questions related to the building of a large-scale national sports stadium were facilitated by historic links the inspectors had developed with relevant employers, related engineers and trade unionists. The networks established in the sector historically allowed for a level of trust to evolve around challenging developments on the site and for problems to be picked up earlier than might be anticipated. The figure of the inspector as someone who could be confided in and updated on developments at an earlier stage formed a part of the regime of engagement amongst inspectors.

Third, a socially progressive occupational identity and status emerged that was further reinforced by the legacy of inspectors’ ‘supportive’ and ‘focused’ fieldwork, and the increasing status of health and safety inspection since the 1970s. Labour inspectors were seen as being dedicated specialists with a ‘calling’ to the work they did. The emergence of health and safety regulation coincided with an increasing level of specialisation in the area but also career paths based on a strong ethical commitment. The emergence of occupational identity is always complex and dependent on a range of factors (Wiles, 2013). The expanding role of key state-related agencies dedicated to the implementation and awareness of health and safety regulations facilitated a stronger sense of occupational identity, a salient factor that enhances cohesion and collectivism within groups of workers, allowing them to address challenges to their role over time (Guillaume and Kirton, 2020; Kirton and Guillaume, 2019).

However, such analysis arguably understates the pressures on labour inspectors relating to resource constraints, (de)regulatory change and the increasing prominence of regulatory breaches (see below) in a context of austerity and deregulation, as seen in Britain over the last decade, narrowing the scope for more relational and conciliatory approaches. The pedagogic aspect of inspectorates is increasingly reliant on online toolkits rather than interventions from inspectors themselves (Tombs and Whyte, 2013), and the situation is further complicated by an increasingly marketised logic within regulatory agencies (as with fees for intervention levied by the Health and Safety Executive in the British case). Such pedagogic, relational approaches, related to notions of ‘regulatory new governance’, are argued to take insufficient account of organisational power dynamics within the employment relationship (Vosko et al., 2016), and also arguably underestimate the extent of regulatory evasion and overestimate the cooperativeness of employers with regulatory agencies. Further problems include the difficulties of regulating in a pedagogic and relational fashion when the social and political skills and capital needed for regulatory actors to work in this way have been significantly eroded. These developments in a case like Britain severely constrain the agency of regulators and inspectors in terms of forging networks with other actors within regulatory work, casting some doubt on the extent to which inspectors are able to act as ‘sociological citizens’ and indeed whether such approaches would have positive regulatory outcomes (Haines, 2011: 119–120; MacKenzie and Martínez Lucio, 2019; Silbey, 2011). It has also been argued that a focus on the activity of inspectors and regulatory agencies fails to capture the breadth of regulatory activity which takes place at the workplace level as opposed to deriving from regulatory interventions (Almond and Gray, 2017). While prominent examples of regulatory agencies engaging productively with civil society and labour organisations are identified in the US (Fine, 2017), Latin America and elsewhere (Amengual, 2014; Coslovsky, 2011; Pires, 2011), there are numerous political and institutional barriers to the development of such approaches.

A breadth of concerns relating to the nature of regulators, their orientations, how open they are to collaborative work, institutional change and discretion are evident in the literature on regulatory enforcement. There is relatively less attention paid to the position of inspectors and employees of regulatory agencies and how the nature of their work affects and is affected by such dynamics. The article now turns to literature that situates such employees within a wider public sector employment relationship and the implications of themes drawn from labour process theory on their work and its outcomes.

Labour inspection, the employment relationship and the labour process of regulatory work: Flexibility, teamworking, collaboration and deskilling

Labour inspectors fulfil a curious and contradictory role as representatives of state bureaucracies with a degree of autonomy in some cases to challenge established interests within the state and capital. Marx frequently drew on evidence collected on working conditions by factory inspectors tasked with enforcing the post-1833 Factory Acts, with one inspector, Leonard Horner, praised for ‘undying service to the English working class. He carried on a lifelong contest, not only with the embittered factory owners, but also against the Cabinet’ (Marx, 1976: 334). The relative autonomy that such figures were able to achieve was therefore noted even at the origins of the inspectorate, due not solely to questions of commitment and ethical values but also in relation to generating alliances among a broader range of affected individuals and social organisations. The role of workers tasked with enforcing regulation is a complex one and subject to competing pressures within a policy context that often favours deregulation in the ostensible interests of employers, fluctuating resource allocation and the changing nature of work and the labour market.

Internationally, the impact of austerity has been highlighted as having a negative effect on the resources available for enforcement purposes (Vosko et al., 2016: 376), with technical staff and inspectors suffering pay freezes, leaving for more lucrative private sector jobs, and increasingly performance managed in a way that may be inappropriate to the very nuanced nature of inspection and enforcement activity. However, much of the focus of critical studies concerns relations with employers, the nature of enforcement, institutional networks and quantitative change in resources and capacity within the inspectorate, and is less concerned with matters related to qualitative changes in their work and employment conditions. Pressures relating to austerity, regulatory change and marketisation impact on the role of regulatory agencies, their scope to collaborate with other actors and adopt innovative and inclusive approaches to enforcement, and the extent to which they might overcome enforcement gaps. These pressures determine the nature of their employment relationship within regulatory agencies and, we argue, subsequently influence the nature and process of regulation itself.

Some of the core themes established within the labour process tradition, including flexibilisation, teamworking and collaboration, and the nature of skill are highly relevant to the nature of work in regulatory agencies and have been underemphasised in much of the literature on inspection and enforcement. Employer-led flexible working has been a feature of the public sector in Britain under austerity (Lewis et al., 2017), as has work intensification (Carter et al., 2013), placing a great deal of pressure on a public sector workforce simultaneously subject to pay freezes and threats of job loss (Cohen et al., 2019). The decentralisation of governance functions and the application of performance management to the civil service, agencies and those working within them are core principles of New Public Management (Carter et al., 2011; Diefenbach, 2009: 894), and these are characteristics of the system of state regulators concerned with employment standards in Britain (Mustchin and Martínez Lucio, 2020). While agency proliferation is a feature in other countries, including Germany, in terms of direct state regulation of work and employment, liberalisation of the labour market within such states was partly achieved by using corporatist forms of governance ‘in order to gain acquiescence to neoliberal macroeconomic and social policies from labour movements’ (Howell, 2016: 579–580). In contrast, union exclusion has been a key feature of the particular variant of regulatory and labour market reform seen in Britain, particularly from 2010 onwards.

The complexity of labour market problems, different legislation and ‘protections’ enforced by different agencies means there is an increasing emphasis on (internal) teamworking and (external) multi-agency work. A challenge to this relates to the inherent rigidities that exist when multiple agencies regulate different but related issues within work and employment (e.g. HMRC covers minimum wage enforcement, the GLAA problems relating to subcontracting and unfree labour, and the HSE a broad range of work-related hazards), and these divides create notable constraints in terms of the work of inspectors, their remit and levels of discretion. Much of the literature on enforcement (e.g. Fine, 2017) calls for greater engagement between enforcement agencies and civil society, but limited resources, deregulation, anti-union politics within the neoliberal state and similar militate against inspectors having the capacity, resources and commitment to developing such links. While this decentralised, multi-agency approach has been praised for its flexibility and innovation (e.g. Blanc, 2016: 221), in the case of Britain, such collaborations or intra-state coalitions have often marginalised unions and instead sought to address wider political priorities like immigration policy (Mustchin and Martínez Lucio, 2020). Regulation is effectively enacted through multi-employer networks, with ‘market-based transactions across permeable interorganizational boundaries’ impacting negatively on working conditions while weakening organisational commitment and the scope to establish ‘workable monitoring and performance measures’ (Thompson, 2003: 365). In addition to these themes of flexibility, teamworking and inter-organisational collaboration, further issues familiar to debates concerning the labour process relate to the nature of skill within the regulatory workforce. The changing nature of skills and occupational identity at work (e.g. Braverman, 1974; Gallie, 1991; Grugulis et al., 2004) is especially relevant when analysing the differing inspection and enforcement agencies in Britain. Most GLAA inspectors have a background in policing, most HMRC minimum wage enforcement employees are drawn from elsewhere in the civil service, and in the case of the HSE, there has been a move away from recruitment of inspectors with experience of hazardous industries to a model based around a graduate trainee scheme (Mustchin and Martínez Lucio, 2020). Regulators require considerable communication, relational and technical skills in order to properly implement and enforce labour market regulation (Hardy et al., 2013), and simultaneous processes of professionalisation, standardisation and decoupling of regulators from experience of the workplaces where they intervene have considerable implications for the nature of regulatory work and its outcomes.

The empirical analysis below is structured in three main sections: firstly, the wider context of austerity and state restructuring is explored in terms of how these have impacted on the nature of inspection, enforcement and regulatory work in quantitative terms. The second section focuses on notions of teamworking and collaboration within and between regulatory agencies and with labour and civil society organisations, again in the context of extant boundaries and structures within the ‘workplace’ of the inspectorates. The final empirical section focuses on issues relating to skills, performance management and regulatory capacity, and how changing approaches to skill, pedagogical approaches to regulation and the social reproduction of the regulatory workforce impact on the work of regulators. These dimensions correspond to the questions of knowledge, alliance making and organisational space outlined in debates mentioned earlier in terms of the way inspectors work. A secondary question concerns how these dynamics of change impact on the capacity of regulatory agencies and the implications for regulatory outcomes themselves.

Research methods

The findings below draw on a qualitative study of the work of enforcement and inspection agencies in Britain, associated state agencies and other labour market actors including unions, civil society organisations and employers. Fieldwork was carried out in 2016–2019, involving 35 in-depth interviews with 45 individuals (four interviews involved multiple respondents) working in the field of enforcing employment regulation. Interviewees included 12 inspectors from the HSE, GLAA and HMRC, and it is these interviews that are the core focus of this article. Gaining interview access with inspectors themselves was challenging; a snowball sampling approach was taken with initial contacts providing access to others, allowing us to interview inspectors with wide experience of different agencies, areas of labour market enforcement, employing sectors, career routes prior to becoming an inspector, and differing perspectives on the work they did. While this constitutes a relatively small sample, the data generated provide rich insights across two dimensions: firstly, considerable detail on institutional and organisational change deriving from their status as ‘expert interviewees’; and secondly, there was detailed reflection on the changing nature of their own employment relationships within regulatory bodies. This allows for an analysis of institutional and organisational change that captures the influence of institutional pressures on organisational change within regulatory bodies as well as how they were experienced by those working within them, and how ‘institutional pressures are subjectively perceived and acted upon’ (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2009: 178). A qualitative approach to such issues informed by notions of ‘street-level bureaucracy’ allows for the complexity of internal organisational dynamics and the agency of those enacting them through their work to be captured (Brodkin, 2003). The interviews with inspectors are augmented with secondary source material and contextualised by the other interviews which were held with trade unionists (Trades Union Congress [TUC], Unite, Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians [UCATT], Prospect, Public and Commercial Services Union [PCS], Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers [USDAW]), civil society organisations concerned with health and safety, modern slavery and employment tribunal access, plus advice services, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS), the police and employer associations. These actors were selected due to their importance within the wider, fragmented governance network concerned with labour market regulation, allowing for close analysis of how state actors worked (or otherwise) with civil society, labour and other actors in pursuing regulatory goals, resonating with the approach taken in other research concerned with alliances, coalitions and more networked approaches to regulation and governance (e.g. Amengual, 2014; Coslovsky, 2011; Haines, 2011; Pires, 2011; Silbey, 2011). This work builds on earlier studies (overall constituting a further 30 interviews with similar actors along with observational data and grey literature) by the authors focused on enforcement and inspection agencies in Britain (Martínez Lucio, 2011) and attempts to foster collaboration between unions, civil society organisations and enforcement agencies (Mustchin, 2014). This combined body of over 70 interviews allowed us to engage with the employment relationship of labour inspectors both within and beyond their organisational remits. We were able to map changes from the point of view of the inspectors themselves across a range of relevant operational and work-related issues.

Four main research themes were explored within this overall set of linked projects: the changing nature of employment regulation and its enforcement; the influence of the post-2010 governments’ simultaneously deregulatory and more interventionist (in some respects) agenda with regard to how the state regulates the labour market (Howell, 2016); how the nature of labour inspection work has changed in a context of state restructuring and public sector employment under austerity policies; and the scope for collaboration among enforcement agencies, unions, civil society and other actors involved in employment regulation, inspection and enforcement. The third of these themes is the core focus of this article, which seeks to draw out how the nature of labour inspectors’ work and their employment relationship has changed and ultimately impacts on the nature of regulation itself, although key points relating to context, shifting state policies and the capacity to collaborate among and between agencies drawn from the other three themes are also directly relevant. Specific research questions within our interviews focused on the three main themes identified above (the impact of austerity and state restructuring on enforcement and regulatory work; teamworking, inter-agency collaboration and the impact on enforcement work; and notions of skill, pedagogy and their impact on regulatory work). Themes emerged from analysis of the transcripts that demonstrated a relationship between the nature of regulatory work and regulation itself, providing rich insights into the impact of organisational restructuring, resourcing issues, training, recruitment, the nature of contextual knowledge, working with other agencies, task allocation, internal and external organisational relations, working with unions, changing working conditions among the inspection workforce and in the wider labour market, the use of technology and online resources, the role of private sector consultancies, and wider discourses regarding the regulation of work and health and safety. Thematic analysis of these subjects within our empirical data forms the structure of the findings section below around resourcing issues, collaboration, occupational identity and the management regimes the inspection workforce is subject to.

Findings

The findings below address the overall research question (how has institutional and organisational change impacted on the occupational identity of inspectors, the nature of their work and employment relationship, and the subsequent framing and enactment of labour market regulation?) and are structured around three main themes: questions of quantitative changes and resource issues; institutional collaboration, cross-agency teamworking, and occupational identity; and changes in terms of teamworking, skills and accountability through performance measurement. These impact across the three agencies in question. While the three agencies differ in their remit, occupational identities and exogenous challenges, commonalities include their location within the public sector employment relationship, wider state regulatory structures and within emerging pressures and contradictions deriving from political contingencies including austerity. Organisational changes, shifting internal boundaries and new forms of management practices and control have had an impact on the nature of work within, and the external influence of, the various inspection and enforcement agencies.

The context of austerity, regulatory change and regulatory change: The quantitative challenges to enforcement work

Labour inspectors and other staff working for regulatory agencies such as the HSE, GLAA and HMRC minimum wage enforcement are employed within the UK Civil Service. The civil service workforce has in recent years been subject to managerial reforms including lean-influenced New Public Management leading to notable work intensification (Carter et al., 2013), job cuts, pension reductions and pay freezes, with the largest (and comparatively militant) union in the civil service, the PCS, attacked by the government after 2010 as a potential obstacle to austerity and public sector restructuring (French and Hodder, 2016). Strikes and membership growth have been evident within the PCS, the main union in the GLAA and HMRC (Hodder et al., 2017), and the main civil service union in the HSE, the traditionally more moderate Prospect, has organised some forms of protest and industrial action in opposition to austerity-led deterioration in working conditions. While some increased resources have been allocated to HMRC and to the GLAA in recent years, the HSE has faced major cuts over the last decade. A pledge from the government in May 2020 to allocate an extra £14 million to the HSE in order to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic was criticised by Prospect as representing merely a tenth of the real-terms funding reductions the HSE had suffered over the preceding decade. Numbers of HSE inspectors had fallen from 1617 in 2010 to 1059 in 2020 (James, 2021: 28), with serious concerns over their capacity to recruit and train new inspectors. Since 2010, employers who underpay workers and breach national minimum wage (NMW) regulations have been publicly named, and although naming was suspended from 2018 to 2020 following complaints from some employers, the increased fines levied on non-compliant firms constitute a more assertive enforcement approach. However, analysis of 2018 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings data suggests that at least 11,000 firms had underpaid workers, with HMRC identifying only 1456 firms that underpaid (Resolution Foundation, 2020: 4). Similarly, the enhanced powers of the GLAA have resulted in the agency increasing the number of identified victims of labour exploitation from 7550 to 15,186 between 2018 and 2020, recovering £166,605 of unpaid wages and holiday pay on behalf of 2374 workers in 2019–2020. However, despite the political symbolism of such interventions as a means of illustrating that the state is seen to be acting forcefully, criminal charges relating to labour exploitation and modern slavery remain very low, with only one instance of charges following GLAA referrals to the Crown Prosecution Service between 2018 and 2020 (GLAA, 2020). There has been widespread exposure of workers deemed ‘essential’ during the pandemic to Covid-19, and despite government claims that the HSE ensured that ‘businesses are keeping employees safe’, they made only 5344 visits to British workplaces during the first 6 months of the pandemic. These inspections resulted in 78 notices and no prosecutions, and represented a 40% decline in inspection numbers compared to the same period in 2019 (James, 2021: 27–31). The pandemic has fragmented work, made access to workplaces increasingly difficult for regulatory agencies, and made the forms of networking and engagement with employers, managers and unions that are crucial to the effectiveness of inspection enforcement even more difficult to maintain.

Widespread challenges to the work of enforcement agencies derive from the increasingly fragmented nature of the labour market, neoliberal policy agendas that are deregulatory in some respects and more interventionist in others (Howell, 2016), and the capacity and willingness of many employers to breach regulations in areas including pay, health and safety, subcontracting and other individual employment rights. However, the work of inspectors and regulatory agencies also needs to be considered in terms of the nature of their employment relationship, and the findings below show how the nature of their employment relates to these wider institutional changes and ultimately impacts on the nature and enforcement of regulation itself. Austerity had led to a reduction in the number of HSE inspectors who had ‘lost an awful lot of their enforcement and inspection authority because they’re simply not out in the field doing the job and being seen to be doing that job’ (Unite national official). This meant an increasingly reactive rather than proactive approach to regulatory enforcement where enforcement agencies ‘wait for complaints before they act’ (Unite regional official). Many of these changes in emphasis were justified politically on the basis that regulation could be developed in novel and innovative ways – with resources being less important than expected: this was a view that took on importance after the Hampton Review of 2004 under the last Labour government: ‘It marked the consolidation of the establishment of what had already been termed “Better Regulation”, a formal policy shift from enforcement to advice and education, a concentration of formal enforcement resources away from the majority of businesses onto so-called high-risk areas, and consistent efforts to do more with less’ (Tombs, 2016: 2). However, the reduction in resources was leading to a more generalist approach from inspectors in some cases as the resources needed to sustain lasting industry-level relationships and social networks were absent: ‘with cuts in people you can’t sustain that many teams of inspectors, so you drop to general groups. So now inspectors in a geographic patch are inspecting absolutely anything’ (HSE inspector).

There had been an approximately 50% cut in staff numbers at the HSE since the mid-1990s, and senior, highly experienced staff were taking the decision to work as independent consultants once they were able to draw their civil service pension, which was linked to Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation while pay was frozen below this rate, leading to a loss of expertise from the public to the private sector. This was especially problematic in agencies such as the Office for Nuclear Regulation, whose inspectors were able to take more lucrative private sector work within industry, and former HSE inspectors and GLAA staff had left for the private sector in order to work within internal compliance and regulatory functions concerned with safety and supply chain operations respectively. This began to damage the ability of regulators to sustain trust relations and longer-term engagement with the environments and groups they were regulating: it also, as discussed below, had a restrictive effect on the industrial and sectoral insights new inspectors were able to develop. One non-governmental organisation (NGO) concerned with worker safety that worked closely with inspectors felt that:

. . . a lot of them are very fed up but they’re very worried. They have to be very careful about how they speak because there’s a real witch-finder unit which will try and find out who’s leaked what . . . resource issues come up and are obvious. But it’s more than their job’s worth to tell you that, so you have to read between the lines. (Worker safety NGO)

Some of these changes and developments in terms of austerity have become embedded in a range of other parallel enforcement initiatives especially within the local state. Gray and Barford (2018), in their writings on the local state, outlined how its capacity to intervene was being fundamentally undermined by the systematic withdrawal of resources. Visits, enforcement notices and prosecutions led by Environmental Health Officers (EHOs) (who are engaged at the level of local government and have regulatory responsibility for workplace safety in the food and retail industries) had fallen dramatically since 2010 (James, 2021: 29). Many interviewees reflected on how parallel enforcement activities conducted by EHOs were being undermined in terms of both resources and the nature of their work:

EHOs . . . are less pro-active in local authorities, much more campaign led, and it’s all based on this nudge-nudge theory and philosophy. This idea that you give the appearance, or you intervene, at certain points and this knocks all employers into place, as such, and they all start behaving. (HSE inspector)

Deteriorating terms and conditions, job insecurity and authoritarian management are common themes in many accounts of public sector reform and restructuring. However, in this context, such pressures have wider implications for the regulation of work and enforcement of employment rights. The collaborative, pedagogical approaches to inspection and enforcement identified in the literature (e.g. Piore, 2011) become increasingly difficult to enact given this context of limited resources. Much of the literature on inspection and enforcement highlights the capacity of inspectors as ‘sociological citizens’ (Silbey, 2011) to innovate through their engagement with networks of relevant actors and interests (Amengual, 2014; Coslovsky, 2011; Fine, 2017; Pires, 2011). Thus, innovation through alliance making and a broader shared approach to regulatory enforcement (Blanc, 2016: 221) has been undermined with regulatory work often reduced to minimalist bureaucratic routines underpinned by more extensive performance measurement. Resource restrictions, institutional barriers to cooperation and entrenched anti-unionism within the British state thus militated against collaborative, team-based approaches, which are turned to next.

Networks, cross-agency teamworking and occupational identity: The challenges of collaboration across boundaries

Team-based approaches to regulatory enforcement were evident, including inter-agency collaboration with regulatory work being enacted through multi-employer networks (Thompson, 2003: 365). This raised important issues regarding different occupational identities, contrasting regulatory priorities among agencies, and the capacity for agency and innovation among the inspectorate’s workforce. A number of more positive accounts of changing approaches to inspection highlight the value of labour inspectorates working with unions, civil society organisations and other state entities, tackling regulatory problems through the use of multi-agency teams (Amengual, 2014; Coslovsky, 2011; Fine, 2017; Pires, 2011). Such relational, networked approaches to regulation raise important issues for the nature of work done by inspectors, relating to ethical issues, a more ‘coercive’ approach in some agencies compared to others, and the impact on the occupational identity and legitimacy of enforcement agencies and their employees. Contradictions and tensions were evident between attempts to increase collaborative work with unified aims and objectives and increasing levels of complexity and agency specialism – a number of separate agencies enforce employment regulation in Britain, militating against the more unitary style of enforcement identified in the Franco-Iberian context (Piore and Schrank, 2008).

A key tension in terms of occupational identity related to the increasing overlaps between civilian-based agencies tasked with enforcing employment regulations and more coercive functions relating to policing, law enforcement and immigration law. HSE inspectors had been approached by other government agencies, typically under the auspices of the Home Office, in order to use the HSE’s legal access to any given workplace to assist interventions where workers may have had unlawful immigration status, which inspectors and the HSE had resisted due to the damage it caused in terms of trust relationships and the perception of their agenda. Complexities were evident with the role of GLAA inspectors, who had multiple roles relating to the compliance with legislation of subcontractors and gangmasters as well as an investigative role increasingly focused on enforcing the 2015 Modern Slavery Act. This newer role had strengthened the GLAA:

We’ve always come across modern slavery and we’ve always dealt with the victims of modern slavery . . . we’ve just never had the power to actually investigate the offence, so we’ve always had to go in with partner agencies in the past. The difference now is that we can actually do it on our own and we can arrest for [those] offences now as well. (GLAA inspector)

Problems still existed in terms of the enforcement capacity of the GLAA. While gangmasters were highly prevalent in construction, GLAA inspectors were sometimes prevented from accessing construction workplaces due to a lack of full health and safety accreditation. Problems also arose with minimum wage breaches:

The legislation says that if the GLAA are out and we find a labour market offence and a labour market offence is breach of National Minimum Wage, we can deal with that . . . Practically we’ve been told we can’t, because we’re then stepping on the foot of the National Minimum Wage inspectors and we don’t know how to calculate underpayments . . . what we have to do is just gather the evidence, send it off to National Minimum Wage, ask them to do their calculations, then go back, by which point, they’ve probably shut down, disappeared and took all the exploited workers with them. (GLAA inspector)

Working with immigration enforcement was also problematic due to the differing priorities and identities held by those working in regulatory enforcement as opposed to policing functions:

We’re at loggerheads with each other, Immigration Enforcement want to kick people out, we want to help people, if you take an Immigration Enforcement officer on a job, people will shut down, firstly and foremost, they turn up in their full kit, their ear pieces on, Immigration Enforcement, you’re a Romanian national who has every right to be here because they’re part of the EU . . . for example, they’re not getting paid National Minimum Wage, but they’re also not going through the books legitimately, so there’s no National Insurance contributions, so according to EU rights, they’ve not exercised treaty rights . . . by law, Immigration Enforcement can deport them, because they’ve not exercised treaty rights. (GLAA inspector)

The tension between policing and civil regulation was evident in terms of reported practice and examples, and it was argued that the GLAA’s heavy reliance on former police officers when recruiting inspectors was problematic:

We’ve gone down the route of employing a lot of ex-police officers, which is great from an investigation point, not so great when it comes to dealing with victims . . . they’ve come in with a totally wrong mind set and, for me, who has been in the job for a long time now, it’s frustrating, because you want to just shake them and, sort of go, step down a couple of notches now you’re dealing with human beings and you’re dealing with people and you can’t walk in with your police head on anymore. (GLAA inspector)

An example was given of an experienced GLAA inspector who had become disillusioned by the heavily police-oriented culture in the organisation as well as the difficulties caused by fragmented organisations, taking her experience to set up an independent consultancy working with private sector clients: ‘they’re building a mini police force and I feel like those of us who aren’t police background are being, sort of, pushed out slightly’ (GLAA inspector).

From this it can be seen that collaborative working is stymied by inter-organisational tensions, the fragmented nature of both employment regulation and enforcement, and issues of culture and occupational identity within enforcement agencies. The link between the HSE and unions had also weakened – where union health and safety reps had historically been able to liaise with and directly contact inspectors in specific industries, this link was now gone due to the reduced overall number of inspectors, resource limitations and greater job rotation. Combined with wider government hostility towards unions within the public sector, there are evidently significant constraints on enforcement agencies engaging with labour and civil society organisations in the positive fashion identified elsewhere (Amengual, 2014; Coslovsky, 2011; Fine, 2017; Pires, 2011), suggesting that while employees of regulatory agencies may have the awareness, reflexivity and consciousness of wider networks assumed within the notion of ‘sociological citizens’ (Silbey, 2011), elements of their employment relationship relating to teamworking, collaboration and political contingencies restrict this potential.

Skills, knowledge, teamworking, performance management and the social reproduction of regulatory work

Issues relating to skill, experience, the reproduction of the inspection and enforcement workforce and performance management were significant within our findings and have a wider significance within the literature on enforcement. Tutelary or pedagogical approaches from enforcement agencies to working with employers and improving their behaviour (Piore, 2011; Piore and Schrank, 2008) assume a high level of knowledge and particular skills along with the capacity to develop long-term relationships with employers who are assumed to be open to such advice. In the British context, resource constraints, distortions introduced by commercialisation processes, loss of knowledge and challenges in terms of reproducing the inspection workforce following job losses and redundancies, and the impact of performance management systems on the behaviour of regulatory actors all raise significant issues with regard to flexibility, skills and the nature of enforcement.

Performance management processes had been introduced across the civil service (Carter et al., 2013), with increased managerial evaluation of enforcement processes and outcomes a feature. Interviewees reported rising levels of stress and work intensification within enforcement agencies and that this was in part driven by the tensions and contradictions within performance management processes:

There’s been the introduction of some form of performance related pay which has caused difficulty, and there’s a significant argument being put forward that inspectors should not be subject to performance related pay because it starts to make the whole thing subjective. (HSE inspector)

Performance was judged in relation to peers, therefore it was possible for a group of inspectors to all be working satisfactorily but under the ‘guided distribution’ approach to performance appraisal, some would be deemed to be performing less than their colleagues and therefore targeted as needing to improve: ‘it’s not based on your contribution and what is expected of you, it is dependent on what your colleagues are perceived to have achieved . . . there is a tacit acceptance that not everybody is going to be deemed to be satisfactory’ (HSE inspector). This was generating various pay inequalities within the workforce, with part-time, older and disabled workers found in union research to typically do worse under this form of performance management than others, and ostensibly high performing staff not meaningfully rewarded either:

. . . it’s been a very disruptive performance system . . . where you would have layers of management trying to find the 10% . . . towards the bottom . . . There’s supposed to be 20% recognised as performing better and then getting rewarded for that, but . . . you’ve got this kind of system against a 1% pay bill cap, and the ability of departments to do anything meaningful to reward them. We’ve now got huge recruitment and retention issues opening up because the salaries are no longer competitive. (HMRC interviewee)

Within all three agencies, this was generating a short-term culture concerned with caseload management and scaled-back interventions which weakened longer-term relational and pedagogic approaches to regulation, and this militated against the developmental aspects of the job where traditionally an inspector learnt through a range of taught and experiential methods. The fragmentation of caseloads also meant that there was a more generalist, less industry-specific focus in some cases which undermined the development of more comprehensive sets of skills and knowledge that could assist in detecting lack of legal compliance.

Notions of skill, experience, qualification and the nature of inspection work had changed markedly, with many interviewees describing a loss of organisational ‘memory’, experienced staff leaving the inspectorates, an increasing prevalence of trainees by way of replacement, and less technical training for HSE inspectors. There was ‘a huge correlation between the resources cutting and the deregulatory agenda in government . . . but the mechanism is the resources. So, if you want to stop people inspecting you just cut the number of inspectors’ (HSE inspector). Shrinking resources and attrition of experienced staff placed increasing pressure on remaining staff to train the limited number of new entrants to the HSE, in very challenging circumstances and with less reference to the reality of working in the field and specific workplaces:

[We’re] saturated with the training burden . . . the first five years, for that period you’ve got a one to one mentor and you are out on joint visits a huge amount of the time . . . you have to kind of put by an hour either in a coffee shop or the office afterwards debriefing . . . to take the time to coax them and mentor them. (HSE inspector)

Teamworking, skills, training and the reproduction of the inspection workforce under conditions of austerity were extremely challenging issues, and while the GLAA emphasised recruiting former police or investigative employees, training health and safety inspectors via a graduate trainee scheme in the context of resource limitations and deregulation created major challenges both in terms of inspectors’ experiences of work itself and by extension the nature of regulatory interventions. In this respect, some elements of the two-tier professionalism and deskilling seen in other public services were becoming visible in the realm of HSE inspection, with wider implications for the nature of regulation and its enforcement. The dynamics of the employment relationship within regulatory agencies has been underrepresented in many discussions of inspection, enforcement and labour regulation more broadly, although it evidently has a significant and often underemphasised impact on the nature and outcomes of regulation itself.

Discussion: Austerity, ‘collaboration’ and innovation in the employment relationship within regulatory work

This article addresses an overall research question: how has institutional and organisational change impacted on the occupational identity of inspectors, the nature of their work and employment relationship, and the subsequent framing and enactment of labour market regulation? This was addressed with a focus on three main themes: the impact of austerity and changing state regulatory priorities on the employment of inspectors; collaboration and cross-agency teamworking among different enforcement agencies and labour market actors; and the impact of flexibilisation, deskilling and the changing public sector employment relationship within regulatory agencies. By focusing more on the enforcement workforce and their employment relationship than is implied in work on labour inspectors framing them as ‘sociological citizens’ (Silbey, 2011), we argue that the nature of work within regulatory agencies is subject to many of the pressures identified elsewhere in the public sector (e.g. Bach and Bordogna, 2016; Carter et al., 2013; Guillaume and Kirton, 2020; Hyde at al., 2016; Kirton and Guillaume, 2019), and crucially that these pressures ultimately have an impact on how the labour market is regulated and aspects of labour legislation are enforced. It generates a form of deregulation by default as the core elements of workers’ rights are concealed or not acted upon by relevant state agencies directly or in relation to civil society networks and organisations.

However, various factors have driven the changes facing labour inspectors. Firstly, in terms of austerity, a lack of resources and a thinly stretched inspectorate workforce militated against tutelary, pedagogical approaches to enforcement where regulatory agencies work closely with employers over a sustained period (Piore, 2011). Increasingly such attempts to educate employers around regulation were reduced to the provision of online ‘toolkits’ and similar rather than the closer relationships envisaged elsewhere in the literature. Secondly, the inspectors interviewed demonstrated the characteristics identified by Silbey (2011) of ‘sociological citizens’, with evident awareness of wider social relations, relevant actors also working in the area of employment regulation and the potential for networked approaches to regulating work, as highlighted elsewhere (Amengual, 2014; Coslovsky, 2011; Fine, 2017; Pires, 2011). However, resource constraints, bureaucratic fragmentation and latent anti-unionism disseminated from the level of government severely limited such approaches in the British context, meaning that processes of collaboration and inter-agency teamworking were limited and where they did take place were driven by political contingencies relating to immigration control and other priorities rather than the more networked, democratised approach identified elsewhere in the literature on inspection and enforcement. Thirdly, pressures deriving from performance management, increasingly commercialised imperatives within regulatory agencies, and the nature of skills, technical training and social reproduction were manifested in different ways within the three agencies discussed here, and ultimately impacted on the areas of regulation and enforcement more generally. Three further prominent issues regarding the shifting, fragmenting nature of regulatory work therefore can be seen to be emerging from these changes.

Firstly, there has been a decreasing level of work-related ‘control’ and discretion in terms of decision-making amongst inspectors. While this may not be a classic process and case of deskilling (e.g. Braverman, 1974), in a context of limited resources, inspectors increasingly had to compete with centrally pre-established formulas and criteria that appeared, in part, to displace them and obviate their role. One could argue that this was exacerbated by increasingly ‘flexible’ work across industries that undermined the ability to develop specific relations and roles – and specialisms – within a particular, focused range of sectors (bearing in mind the sheer complexity and variation of regulatory issues across different employment contexts). This undermined inspectors’ networking and personal engagement with organisations across time and, thus, their ability to maintain their integrity while ‘nudging’ individuals into conforming with employment regulation.

Second, restricted resources meant that there was less time to engage with and comprehend specific industrial changes and trends in a detailed manner and less time to develop a body of knowledge in relation to the regulatory context. Any view that the ‘expansion’ of inspectorate coverage could represent some form of ‘up-skilling’ and diversification of roles needs to be understood in this context (see Piore and Sabel, 1984, on ‘flexible specialisation’, as an example of the up-skilling narrative, and Gallie, 1991, for a review of the limitations related to flexible specialisation). This loss of knowledge was also linked to the greater use of teamworking and ‘trainees’, with these team dynamics emerging as a significant constraint on the inspectorate’s development of skills and knowledge, especially given the under-resourcing of mentoring and stable senior support within teams. There was a sense of job loading and multi-tasking which generated an increasing level of stress and uncertainty not unlike classic changes in work exploitation elsewhere (Garrahan and Stewart, 1992) and which are increasingly prevalent in the civil service within the UK (Carter et al., 2013). In general terms, knowledge of the industrial context of health and safety was, therefore, steadily undermined and constrained by such organisational changes.

Third, unease in terms of occupational identity was heightened by a certain ‘invisibility’ developing that undermines the status and presence of regulatory work: something accentuated during the pandemic when field visits were minimal. In addition, the joint inter-agency work outlined above created opportunities to sustain and integrate the work of health and safety inspectors and other agencies which created a series of dilemmas in terms of their legitimacy and identity. Inspectors’ work became conflated with coercive and broader policing roles within the state in relation to vulnerable groups of workers, thus potentially undermining more relational, pedagogic approaches to enforcement. The emphasis on online ‘toolkits’ also had an impact on the way inspectors could interact with individuals on the ground. This further generates a certain degree of invisibility reducing health and safety oriented decision-making to managers and trade unionists (or workers) on the ground interpreting such general sets of recommendations and points. Agencies are increasingly focused on non-union, poorly regulated workplaces, meaning that agency–union contact is less common and shallower, exacerbating the exclusion of unions from regulatory processes while reducing the presence and credibility of regulatory agencies from the perspective of unions themselves. There was relatively little formalised engagement with unions in the newer regulatory agencies discussed here (the GLAA and HMRC minimum wage enforcement function), and in the case of the HSE, unions maintain some residual influence which can be traced back to the design of health and safety regulation during the mid-1970s ‘social contract’. The reduced workplace presence of unions has eroded their regulatory capacity, and while unions maintain some influence within the HSE more centrally, this too has been eroded while resources and staffing levels have fallen markedly. While such changes are to an extent separate developments, they are consistent with an ideology that has sought to weaken and exclude unions (as opposed to incorporating them), unravel the vestiges of more corporatist approaches to policy and regulation, and to demonise health and safety regulation as an affront to the liberty of individuals and employers.

Hence, the ways in which more expansive (yet shallower) roles across industrial sectors, state agencies and within virtual/online dimensions have evolved, together with a stronger sense of being exploited in terms of their own work and status, are leading to significant changes in the way inspectors’ work is conducted, how they are perceived in occupational terms, and their visibility given their increasingly infrequent physical presence within the workplaces they seek to regulate.

Conclusion

The workforce within agencies tasked with regulation, enforcement and inspection in relation to labour markets, work and employment is a less commonly researched area of the public sector in comparison to health, local government, law enforcement and other functions of the state. The changing nature of the employment relationship within enforcement and inspection functions ultimately impacts on and shapes the nature of the broader scope of employment regulation itself. These changes emerge due to austerity and subsequent resource limitations, tensions and contradictions within different areas of employment regulation, constraints on the capacity for collaborative work and civil society or union engagement, and changes in skills, social reproduction, work intensification and the nature of regulatory work. They also emerge due to the way the work is being technically reorganised and distanced from the field both in terms of knowledge and sheer physical presence. There is a need, when discussing regulatory actors, to focus on the internal dimension of regulatory work itself when assessing how the state regulates employment and how the nature of public sector employment ultimately impacts on the capacity of state functions seeking to regulate abuses of employment standards. The outcomes of such developments have the effect of undermining the regulatory capacity of the state and subsequently the enforcement of legal rights and employer obligations due to the way that serious gaps emerge in terms of the knowledge of the employment terrain and the increasing social distance that inspectors find between themselves and those they interact with. The question of reform within the state’s own employment system may be couched in terms of efficiencies and organisational dexterity but they are by default – and perhaps by design – limiting the efficacy and abilities of the state to regulate and intervene.