Safety leadership: are we making progress?

Dame Judith Hackitt

Dame Judith Hackitt is a chemical engineer by training and spent the first half of her career working in the chemicals industry – both in manufacturing and also as an advocate for the industry at national and international level. She is a former President of the Institution of Chemical Engineers and is a Fellow and Trustee of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Throughout her career she has championed the importance of engineering in delivering solutions which provide benefit to society and has been a role model particularly for young women wanting to enter the engineering profession. She cares deeply about safety in the workplace and more broadly.

From 2007 to 2016 she was Chair of the UK’s Health and Safety Executive and in 2017 conducted an independent review for UK government into building regulations and fire safety in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster. Since publishing her final report in 2018 she has continued to press for regulatory change and for industry culture change and her recommendations for radical reform of the regulatory system received Royal Assent in the Building Safety Act 2022. The change has been described as the biggest shake up in construction regulation in a generation.

Her non-exec roles have included being on the board of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, chair of Enginuity (the engineering and manufacturing skills body) and a board member at HS2. She has received 10 honorary doctorates from universities in the UK and in Australia. She received the Hanson medal from the Institution of Chemical Engineers in 2022 for her work on ethics in engineering and the President’s medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2024 for her outstanding contribution to the Academy and for her contributions to engineering. She is currently chair of the RAE’s membership committee and of the Engineering X Safer Complex Systems programme.