Minimal enforcement of health and safety laws

Although employers have a range of legal duties to prevent or control stress (see above), the enforcement of these duties is minimal. In a 2014 feature on stress in Hazards magazine, Distressing failure, TUC head of health and safety Hugh Robertson said that while 400,000 workers are being made ill as a result of work-related stress every year, the HSE had taken no prosecutions.

Since 2002, HSE inspectors had issued a small number of improvement notices mentioning stress, usually as part of a more general problem, but none had been issued in the previous five years.

According to the TUC’s 2016 biennial survey of safety reps, nearly half of UK workplaces have never had a health and safety inspection – including more than 80% of construction workplaces. Forty six percent of safety reps said that as far as they knew, a health and safety inspector had never visited their workplace; 14% said that any visit took place more than three years ago and a further 16% said that their workplace had been inspected between one and three years ago. Only 25% said that their workplace had been inspected within the last 12 months.

HSE guidance for inspectors on work-related stress and summary details of enforcement notices, along with compliance dates are available on the HSE website.