LEGISLATION & PROCEDURE
HEALTH & SAFETY LAW
Michael Veal, a partner at Lester Altridge LLP, looks at simplifi cation or marginalisation for health and safety law.
It will not have escaped the attention of many that the election of the new government brought with it a renewed focus on health and safety law, and on the regulators themselves. The Prime Minister said: “All too often, good health and safety legislation designed to protect people from major hazards has been extended inappropriately to cover every walk of life, no matter how low risk.” In January 2012, Mr Cameron again spoke of the UK’s safety culture as an “albatross.”
Webbed feet aside, drilling down into the government’s reviews reveals a distinction, albeit blurred in the political message, between compensation claims in the civil courts on the one hand and criminal regulation on the other. So what is the
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current state of play, and what may the future hold?
COMMON SENSE,
COMMON SAFETY In October 2010, Lord Young reported that: “compensation culture driven by litigation is at the heart of the problems that so beset health and safety today.” Whilst recognising that the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 provided an effective framework which brought results in the UK, he found that the public’s perception of health and safety has never been lower.
His recommendations included reform in civil litigation, using the civil litigation costs review as a conduit. He suggested simplification or exemption
of risk assessment requirements in low hazard workplaces, partly through tackling the insurance industry to ensure that low hazard workplaces and worthwhile activities are not tied up in red tape. And he proposed consolidation of the “current raft of health and safety regulations.”
RECLAIMING HEALTH AND
SAFETY FOR ALL Taking the last of these objectives, Professor Ragnar Löfstedt of King’s College London was asked by the Minister for Employment to conduct an independent review of health and safety regulations with a view to their simplification.
In his November 2011 report, “Reclaiming health
and safety for all,” Professor Löfstedt concluded that there was no case for a radical overhaul of current health and safety legislation. He said: “The regulations place responsibilities primarily on those who create the risks, recognising that they are best placed to decide how to control them and allowing them to do so in a proportionate manner.”
However, he went on to identify some factors which drive businesses beyond what is required by the law and what is proportionate, and, in doing so, made a number of recommendations, including some targeted at reducing the burden on no-risk work activities, improving guidance and engaging with the European Commission in its planned review of
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