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.