If a company is self-regulating...?

Question

and they are only subject to voluntary compliance...and then something goes wrong like a major health and safety violation leading to death - is the regulator not responsible too along with the company for not compling?

So say instead of doing regular inspections and enforcing violations, a regulatory body instead only enforces once an accident has happened, why is it that just the company itself is blamed rather than the regulatory body who decided to make them self-regulating instead of doing the inspections and enforcing violation?

Sorry if that makes no sense at all...I am clearly very confused!

Answer 1

Think about it this way: the law says that you can't kill people. Our regulatory body (say, the police) allows us to "self-regulate" (i.e. you're trusted to watch your own behavior, live in the world, and not kill anybody). However, one night for whatever reason, you stab somebody. At that point, the regulatory body (i.e. the police) lock you up and regulate your behavior for you. Assuming there were no warnings that you were going to go stab somebody, is it the police's fault that you did that? Should they have locked you up at birth to make sure it never happened? Of course not. The same applies to companies - why regulate the innocent until they've proven they can't handle the responsibilty of self-regulation?