Regulatory Reform

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the health and safety regulatory burdon in the UK is over-the-top, gets in the way of enterprise and is generally an obstacle to success and sales. So much so that a review is currently being undertaken (unusually for a review, it is being undertaken by someone who has some prior knowledge of the subject at hand c.f. the Lord Young report). The usual suspects have all put their points forward, and I don't intend repeating them here.

But have we stopped to really think about the issues at hand before opening our mouths and putting forth our most important points of view?

Point 1: the only regulatory requirement most people have heard of is that we must do a risk assessment for everything, and that is why everything has gone wrong with the country

Point 2: A number of people know for certain that ladders are banned

Point 3: There is too much of everything else

Talk to the average business owner, running a small business, without any occupational safety advice and they may well not be aware of much more than this. Which is fine - they have a business to run, after all, and there is no nice website where you can select your activities and be told what applies.

For me, this gets to the crux of the matter - not that the regulatory environment is crippling SMEs (and I think whatever the CBI says, this is rather obviously not true - rather more likely that current trading conditions are crippling SMEs) but that SMEs without a safety advisor struggle to even know what applies. And while I agree that it will be useful to look for ways of simplifying regulations, more important really to see how we can make sure that the key bits of those are recognised and complied with  -especially key stuff, like COSHH, manual handling - where repeated exposures/operations can lead to problems later in life. To understand why this is important, consider the 5000 people who die every year from asbestos related diseases.

Just one more point, before I go - most regulations come as a direct result of risk-based European Directives - so we couldn't get rid of them even if we wanted to.

Introduction

So Health and Safety doesn’t immediately grab your attention? And maybe it seems a bit dull, a bit pointless or even, perhaps, a bit like common sense? Perhaps you’ve seen newspapers where the “elf and safety” are responsible for banning much of the things we in England hold dear?

Well I can’t promise to make it interesting. And nor do I intend debunking every media story (though I may post occasional links to the army of people who do so).

All I really know is that having seen another comment on a newspaper’s website earlier blaming the “health and safety brigade” (*disclaimer – I may not have copied the misspellings correctly) for various ills, I think there is space for a few more voices occasionally speaking for the other side.

So what is health and safety? What do we do? And why do we ban almost everything that people (especially, for some reason, Daily Mail readers) enjoy doing?

Well, perhaps not surprisingly, there is no simple answer. What do I spend most of my time doing? I try to make sure that construction projects are planned and run in a way that reduces the risk to the people working there. Obvious, you might think. Why do we need a specialist for that?  The answer is that maybe sometimes we don’t need a specialist, and that it is common sense. But a lot of the time, with the pressure being on people to finish early, to get the job done, the common sense is left behind, and apparently sensible people will take all manner of risks. And when I say risks – every year 30-40 people die in the construction industry, and many more are seriously injured. This is despite the best efforts of the government’s Health and Safety Executive inspectors (about who more in later posts) and us professionals, though the figures have improved recently.

In construction there are less obvious issues too that we must think about. If an architect designs a 30 storey tower made of glass, at some point said glass will need cleaning. Cleaning glass 200m in the air is neither a cheap nor particularly pleasant job, so perhaps it’s best to avoid it. Can we pay more upfront for “self-cleaning” glass? Or maybe the windows can invert so they can be cleaned from the inside? Or perhaps we can change the design so building it is made less risky in the first place.

These are some of the reasons that we are around as health and safety professionals. I’ll introduce more in the coming posts, but I hope so far you can see nothing has been banned, I’ve made no mention of conkers, and maybe it’s just made you think a bit.

*note - previously published at a different location