Enforcement strategy

Proactive inspection cuts

In March 2011, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) published a strategy paper, Good health and safety: Good for everyone, aimed at reducing the “burdens on business” of health and safety regulation and changing the “culture of red tape”. The report was written without union consultation and the main change it introduced was a one-third cut in proactive (unannounced) inspections (representing at least 11,000 fewer inspections each year). The change came into effect almost immediately.

The cut in inspections was partly in response to a 35% cut in the HSE’s budget announced in October 2010. A similar cut was made to local authority inspections, representing around 65,000 fewer local authority inspections each year.

Proactive inspections are no longer likely in the following sectors: agriculture, quarries, and health and social care. The reason given by the DWP for withdrawing unannounced inspections from these sectors is because unannounced safety inspections in these sectors are “unlikely to be effective” at maintaining health and safety standards.

Proactive inspections have been abolished altogether in the following sectors, described in the report as “low risk”: textiles, clothing, footwear, light engineering, electrical engineering, the entire transport sector (including air, road, haulage and docks), local authority-administered education, electricity generation and postal and courier services.

A study by Stirling University Professor of Occupational Health Policy Research, Rory O’Neill, published in January 2013, Low life: How the government has put a low price on your life, found that there are now at least 37 designated “sectors without inspectors”. These include agriculture, quarries, plastics, electricity generation and supply and the health service. He also carried out an analysis of official fatality data. This shows that since the government strategy was introduced more than half (53%) of all fatalities in HSE-enforced workplaces have occurred in sectors excluded from HSE’s unannounced inspection programme. And he found that reactive inspections after reported injuries have also plummeted, with only 5% of “‘major injuries” now investigated by HSE.