WASHINGTON and LONDON, Oct. 26, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Penalties imposed by UK government regulators in environmental and safety cases trail far behind fines and settlements for financial and competition-related offences. This is among the revelations made possible by Violation Tracker UK, a new database of regulatory enforcement actions created by a team of UK and U.S. researchers led by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First, a Washington, DC-based non-governmental organisation which provides a similar research tool for the United States.
The UK database was released today and is free to use at violationtrackeruk.org. It combines the records of more than 40 regulatory agencies and has more than 63,000 entries.
"We hope Violation Tracker UK will, like its U.S. counterpart, be helpful to a wide range of users, especially those seeking to reform corporate behaviour," said Good Jobs First Research Director Philip Mattera, who leads the work on the database.
Violation Tracker UK allows users to quickly see which companies have been cited for short-changing workers' wages, cheating consumers, harming the environment, or breaking the law in other ways. It aggregates official government data from regulators such as the Environment Agency, the Financial Conduct Authority, and the Employment Tribunal. Each entry includes a link to the agency website or document from which the data was obtained.
Using a proprietary matching system, Violation Tracker UK shows which of the penalties in the database were imposed on subsidiaries of large parent corporations. The holdings of more than 650 publicly traded and privately held parents are aggregated.
Due mainly to a large bribery settlement with the Serious Fraud Office, the parent company with the largest penalty total (just over £1 billion) is Airbus. The financial services sector accounts for £4.5 billion in penalties, more than any other industry.
Violation Tracker UK enables users to search the data by corporate parent, by subsidiary name, by industry sector, by regulatory agency, by category of offences, by size of penalty, and by headquarters country.
The offence categories are competition, consumer protection, employment, environment, financial, and safety. Competition-related offences account for the largest penalty total, £5.2 billion; financial offences rank second, with £2.8 billion.
Good Jobs First, based in Washington, DC, is a non-profit, non-partisan resource center promoting government and corporate accountability.
Contact: Arlene Martinez at arlene@goodjobsfirst.org or +1 202-232-1616
