The Safety Representatives and Safety Committees Regulations 1977

The Safety Representatives and Safety Committees Regulations 1977 (SRSCR) give recognised trade unions the legal right to appoint workplace safety representatives. The regulations set out the rights and functions of safety reps, employers’ obligations with regard to consultation and the provision of facilities, assistance and information.

The TUC estimates that there are between 100,000 and 120,000 safety reps appointed and supported by trade unions. Last year the TUC trained almost 12,000 safety reps, with individual unions training many more. It argues that safety reps need more legal powers to continue their work, especially given the decline in enforcement and the rolling back of proactive inspections (see Chapter 2: Enforcement).

In September 2014 the TUC published The union advantage, a guide demonstrating the benefits of unions to individual workers, employers and wider society. This sets out that union health and safety representatives save taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds each year by reducing lost time from occupational injuries and work-related illness, according to government research.