 BRITISH oil giant, BP, has repeatedly breached legal safety rules on its rigs in the North Sea over the last year, according to the Government watchdog, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).  The multinational company has continually failed to comply with the HSE s statutory instructions to improve risk assessments after a series of alarming near-misses on several oil platforms, including Clair and Schiehallion west of Shetland and a network of nine fields in the central North Sea.  The revelation comes after BP and its partner oil companies last week announced a massive ?10 billion investment in exploiting new oil and gas reserves around the UK, triggering warm congratulations from Prime Minister David Cameron and the Scottish First Minister, alex Salmond.  The investment is centred around opening up the more dangerous waters west of Shetland, and promises to reverse the decline in UK oil production. It is forecast to create 3000 jobs in the oil and gas supply chain, sustain the Sullom Voe terminal in Shetland for decades and bring in billions of pounds of tax revenues.  at a time of economic recession, this has been greeted as good news by many. and it was heralded by BP on Thursday as proof that the 40-year-old story of the North Sea oil industry was far from over, with drilling now projected to continue to 2050.  But the resurgence of the black stuff has also attracted the ire of the industry s critics, who question unfettered exploitation. They highlight BP s poor safety record, its sometimes disastrous environmental legacy, and the climate pollution that more oil will inevitably cause. BP is still plagued by the memory of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico which became a global scandal over three months in 2010.  The most immediate allegation is about BP s safety performance over the last year. Last November it was served a legal improvement notice by the HSE, which applied to all 40 of the company s offshore oil and gas fields around the UK.  On the Clair rig, HSE said the risks from an oil leak had been inadequately assessed. This involved workers carrying out monitoring  that caused them to deactivate fire detection and suppression systems and open the door of the enclosure thus exposing them to risk should a fire have broken out .  On the Eastern Trough area Project, known as ETaP, which covers nine oil and gas fields, BP considered carrying on when only one of three lifeboats was available. If there had been an accident, it might have been impossible to evacuate all the staff, HSE suggested.  HSE initially gave BP a deadline to fix the problems by the end of May 2011. The deadline was extended to the end of august, and then again to the end of October. The matter is still formally  ongoing .  BP believes that it has now completed the improvements demanded by the HSE, but this has not yet been agreed by the Government regulator. HSE pointed out that because the improvement notice applied to all BP s UK offshore installations there were difficulties in predicting a  realistic  compliance date.  BP has recently communicated to HSE it considers it is now in compliance with the improvement notice, and HSE is now in the process of testing that compliance,  said an HSE spokesman.  In the five years prior to the latest improvement notice, BP breached health and safety rules 54 times with lapses that put workers and the environment at risk.  Inspectors from the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change also said that fou 