As a licence holder, what responsibility do we have for building the company's “Compliance Culture”?

As a licence holder, the company's senior management has ultimate and non-delegable responsibility for establishing and maintaining a positive, organisation-wide “compliance culture”. This involves far more than appointing a compliance officer or writing a few SOPs. Your responsibilities include: 1. **Lead by example**: Demonstrate through all your words and actions the highest commitment to quality and compliance, and never compromise for short-term gain. 2. **Provide resources**: Ensure that the quality and compliance departments have sufficient and independent funding, staff and authority to fulfil their duties. 3. **Set expectations**: Use the company's quality policy and ongoing internal communications to make clear to every employee that compliance is everyone's responsibility, not just the quality department's. 4. **Encourage reporting and continuous improvement**: Create a “blame-free” environment that encourages staff to report errors, deviations and potential issues, treating them as opportunities to improve the system rather than reasons for punishment. 5. **Review performance**: Systematically review the performance of the quality system at regular management review meetings and set directions and targets for continuous improvement.