Enforcement

The TUC health and safety manifesto, Time for change, calls for more priority to be given to preventing stress-related illness with stronger regulations and enforcement.

In 2003, West Dorset General Hospitals NHS Trust became the first employer of its kind to receive a work-related stress enforcement notice from the HSE. Following that, in 2007, University Hospital of North Staffordshire NHS Trust was issued with multiple improvement notices following a work-related stress review. And in 2009, Liverpool Hope University was similarly served with an improvement notice for failure to manage worker stress levels.

Union safety reps have told the Labour Research Department (LRD) how the threat to contact the HSE or their local authority to ask for enforcement measures to be taken against their employer is an effective means of ensuring that action is taken on workplace stress, where more collaborative attempts to engage management have failed.

And the TUC says that although the HSE had intervened many times around issues such as stress, with significant effect in ensuring that employers addressed the issue, in recent years inspection work has considerably declined. Its biennial survey of safety reps, last carried out in 2012, reported that 45% of safety reps said that as far as they knew, a health and safety inspector had never visited their workplace; one in 10 said that it was more than three years ago and a further 16% said that their workplace had been inspected between one and three years ago.

The general union Unite says: “Employers with good workplace safety records are already incorporating stress into their hazard identification process and voluntarily putting measures in place but unfortunately this is not the general trend. Unite believes that unless existing legal obligations are strengthened and enforced the problem of stress at work will not be taken seriously, and measures will not be put in place to deal with this growing problem. As with many other health and safety issues some employers will only comply if they have to do so by law.”