The coalition have long promised to tame the health and safety monster. As we have previously reported, most of this has been huff and bluster about removing a third of regulations and scrapping various requirements. The overall impact on business has been little or no change.
We now have the first of the revised Approved Codes of Practice (ACoP) being issued in draft form for comments and this will give a good indication of the likely impact of the planned changes.
ACoPs are important as they set a base level against which compliance can be judged. In effect, HSC translate European Directives into UK law and HSE give background and guidance through ACoPs on how UK industry should or could comply with these new requirements. This is quite valuable and is also used when making a legal argument as to whether a business has complied with its duties under law in the case of prosecutions and claims in the civil and criminal courts.
HSE has been tasked with updated all existing ACoPs and many rumours have surfaced including cutting all documents to no more that 32 pages and cutting out a number of them altogether. Now that the ACoPs for the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 and the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 have been released we can start to learn more about what the approach of HSE is likely to be.
The changes
Beyond the addition of some hyperlinks taking you directly to guidance material on the HSE website there is a lot to report beyond the fact that the are an easier read and some updates have taken place to remove references to legislation which is no longer in force.
The summary: keep on doing what you’re doing. The changes are looking to be subtle and the only reports where duties and requirements are being cut are made in the headlines of papers and on press releases from the government – if anything changes rest assured that we’ll do our best to update you!
If you have questions on health and safety or would like to work with a young, business focused, dynamic team of safety consultants (no, really, we are dynamic and business focused – especially compared to our competition) then please contact us or directly on 01453 800100. We don’t have a sales team and so you’ll speak directly to a person able to answer your questions.
