Replace the ‘S’: Why safety belongs at the core of ESG

The importance of this question becomes clearer when we consider the global scale of harm associated with poor workplace safety and health.

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), around 2.9 million people die each year from work-related incidents and hundreds of millions more suffer non-fatal injuries and illnesses. The economic cost of these failures is estimated to be close to 4% of global GDP. These are not marginal issues; they are systemic risks that affect people, productivity and long-term economic resilience.

Mike: "Safety performance is not a narrative; it’s a story grounded in outcomes and consequences."

Progress, however, depends on honesty. It has long been clear that too much ESG reporting remains soft-edged and even fluffy. Too often, it has relied on sentiment surveys, aspirational commitments, and point-in-time disclosures that reveal little about how an organisation actually behaves under pressure. At its worst, it becomes the corporate equivalent of “free fruit on Fridays”, visible and well-intentioned, but ultimately cosmetic.

If ESG is to mean anything all, if it is to achieve anything at all, it must prioritise metrics that do good, not just ones that seem good. Environmental impact belongs firmly within that category.

As does governance and transparency, but the ‘S’, the social dimension, remains too broad; frequently being stretched to include everything. And in labouring to be everything, in seeking to serve every master, it becomes inconsequential and unaccountable.

There is a compelling case to replace the ‘S’ with safety, a story that has, for too long, been excluded from mainstream ESGS reporting. Or, at the very least, to recognise safety as the most credible, measurable and independently verifiable component of the social pillar.

If ESG exists to hold organisations accountable for what they do, not merely what they say, then safety performance is the ‘S’ metric with the greatest integrity and accountability:

• It is measurable
• It is independently verifiable
• It carries consequences when it fails.

An organisation that genuinely protects its people, that treats injury prevention and occupational health as leadership priorities rather than compliance obligations, reveals something fundamental about its culture and its governance. Safety performance is not a narrative; it’s a story grounded in outcomes and consequences. And it is arguably a more direct indicator of organisational integrity than sentiment statistics or pay gap disclosures when considered in isolation.

Reframing the ‘S’ around safety would not narrow ESG’s social ambition, it would strengthen it. It would give it teeth. It would take it from a realm of subjectivity to a foundation of fixed truth. This does not diminish the importance of other social priorities such as diversity, modern slavery or human rights. Rather, it introduces a set of metrics within the social pillar that are consistently measurable, auditable and comparable across organisations.

The best part, this data already exists in injury frequency rates, work-related ill health statistics, near-miss reporting patterns, sickness absence trends. These are not aspirational targets or self-assessed commitments. They are operational outputs. They are auditable. They track over time. They tell their own story, not one framed by comms teams and focus groups.

When safety performance deteriorates, it almost always signals something deeper, a culture under strain, leadership that has lost strategic focus, operational pressures crowding out discipline. That is precisely the kind of signal ESG frameworks were designed to detect and address.

British Safety Council’s position is clear: occupational health and safety data should be treated as a core ESG reporting requirement, embedded within frameworks with the same rigour applied to carbon emissions. Not as a footnote. Not as an optional disclosure. But as a central, comparable, independently assured measure of how an organisation treats the people who generate its value. Organisations with strong safety cultures do not conceal their data. They lead with it. 

ESG was conceived to close the gap between corporate narrative and operational reality. Properly measured and verified safety governance is one of the most powerful accountability tools available to achieve that aim.

Frameworks that embed it will endure, strengthen performance, and protect their people. Those that do not risk becoming exercises in disclosure rather than instruments of discipline.

It’s time the ‘S’ stood for something that can be tested, something that cannot be explained away when it fails, and that carries real meaning when it succeeds. Because when an organisation demonstrably protects its people, it demonstrates something larger: that it understands responsibility is not rhetoric but a reality.

Mike Robinson FCA is Chief executive of the British Safety Council