To anyone casting around for a situation to illustrate the expression "adding insult to injury", the £400,000 in fines handed out this week in relation to what became known as the Stockline tragedy may come in handy. Nine lost their lives and 33 were seriously injured when the plastics factory in Maryhill collapsed in a huge gas explosion on May 11, 2004. Two weeks later, Glasgow North MP Ann McKechin met a group of survivors and bereaved relatives. Looking back, the image that remains etched on her memory is of "a room full of people who were all shaking". A full 14 days after the tragedy, these folk were so shocked, so traumatised and so angry that they couldn't stay still. Many of them are still struggling to pick up the pieces of their lives and move on.

Not so the companies involved, ICL Tech Ltd and ICL Plastics Ltd, which quickly switched production to other sites and appear to have hired temporary workers to safeguard valuable orders. Industrialists might hold them up as an admirable example of corporate resilience, the company that rose from the ashes and rubble.

Imposing the fines this week, Lord Brodie warned against equating them to lives lost or injuries. Well, call me perverse, but it's hard not to do the mental maths and come up with just over £10,000 for each casualty. Life could hardly be cheaper in Baghdad! What's funny about this - funny peculiar, definitely not funny ha ha - is that Britain is the country that is meant to be obsessed by health and safety. This is where we cut down avenues of beautiful, mature trees because pedestrians might conceivably trip on their roots; where we forbid children from playing conkers in the playground; where a teenager can be threatened with prosecution for recklessly eating an apple while driving. Have we gone mad?

Lord Brodie went to some pains to explain the insultingly paltry level of the fines by saying that he was taking account of the ability of the companies to stay in business. How kind of him. However, the statement raises an interesting question: whose account was he taking? We can answer that one: the only account he had: ICL's. These figures were not made public, though we know that parent company ICL Plastics had cash holdings of £750,000 two years ago. It also appears to have virtually no debt. Professor Phil Taylor of Strathclyde University, one of the authors of a forthcoming report into the company's health and safety record and its financial affairs, says: "This is a cash-rich organisation." On that basis, fines totalling £400,000 for both companies look easily affordable. In addition, there are unanswered questions about how much they were able to claim in sickness benefit for injured employees and in insurance. Also, it has been suggested that the valuation of their Maryhill site is several years old. Given the big push for more housing, with planning permission its prime location would make it very valuable indeed.

There is something deeply wrong here. By framing the fines to be within the budget of companies that have admitted negligence, this judgment sends a clear message to other Scottish companies that may be cutting corners on safety: don't worry, even if your negligence results in the deaths of nine people, we won't put you out of business.

When the case opened this month, the two companies made great play of the fact that (by contrast with the Transco Larkhall case) they were admitting negligence to spare the families the ordeal of a drawn-out case. The implication is that they might have been cleared.

This is outrageous. The pipework at Stockline did not only contravene modern safety legislation, it didn't even comply with the regulations at the time it was installed - around 1969. This week the court heard that the pipes that corroded and leaked could have been inspected and replaced for barely £400. Instead, the student son of ICL Tech's former managing director, Frank Stott, carried out a risk assessment as part of his holiday job.

Ever since the Zeebrugge ferry disaster in 1987, there have been calls to tighten laws that allow company directors to escape prosecution. Since then there have been 10 major disasters: Hillsborough, King's Cross, the Marchioness riverboat tragedy, the Larkhall explosion and Stockline, plus five big rail crashes - Southall, Hatfield, Paddington, Potters Bar and Carlisle. Between them, they have claimed 465 lives without securing a single conviction for corporate manslaughter. The stumbling block appears to be the difficulty of proving a single controlling mind behind the negligence that leads to such tragedies, especially in large companies or when the tragedy is the result of an accumulation of seemingly small oversights.

A few years ago I interviewed the children's author Nina Bawden, survivor of Potters Bar, the rail crash in which her husband, Austen Kark, lost his life. A footstool supported her crippled leg, elegantly encased in a black lace stocking to disguise its lumpy mis-shapenness. However, her terrible injuries were nothing compared with her grief and anger at "bloody Jarvis", as she persistently called the contractor charged with maintaining that particular stretch of line. It is cold comfort to victims such as her when companies are fined. While shareholders may suffer, directors are untouched.

The accumulation of such misery has boosted the call for changes to corporate manslaughter legislation (corporate homicide in Scotland). After years of prevarication and delay, the new Corporate Man-slaughter and Corporate Homicide Act comes into force next May. Employers and supporters of the Act say it will result in more prosecutions and heftier fines. But Louise Christian, the campaigning solicitor who has made much of the running on this issue, calls it "pretend justice". Though the requirement for "a controlling mind" is removed, so is the possibility of prosecuting individuals. In effect, it is little more than existing health and safety legislation, renamed and dressed up to sound tough.

Scotland had the opportunity to go its own way with a private member's Bill from MSP Karen Gillon, loosely based on Canadian legislation that imposes a legal duty on directors and senior executives to "take reasonable steps to prevent bodily harm". Following the Stockline judgment, she is considering resurrecting it. One possible route is to extend the Macronie review of penalties for British company directors to include health and safety.

In Scotland, we also need to look again at culpable homicide legislation and the relationship between the Health and Safety Executive and procurators fiscal.

Proportionately, Scotland has even more workplace fatalities than England and even fewer prosecutions. This is partly because in England, the HSE brings its own prosecutions, while in Scotland reports are sent to PF offices which do not have health and safety specialists and tend not to prioritise such cases. This is understandable because they may appear trivial compared with rape and murder.

We owe it to those whose lives were shattered by the Stockline tragedy to create a health and safety culture in Scotland that protects workers and punishes employers who don't.