Proactive inspection cuts


The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which oversaw health and safety reforms including targeting and reducing inspections under the Coalition government, set out in its March 2015 report, A final progress report on implementation of health and safety reforms, that the number of proactive inspections carried out by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) had fallen from 33,000 in 2010/11 to 22,000 planned in 2014/15.


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


Proactive inspections have been abolished altogether in the following sectors, described by the DWP 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.


The number of safety inspections being carried out by local authority environmental health officers also dropped, this time by a massive 95% over the last five years, according to a paper presented to a meeting of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) Local Authority Enforcement Liaison Committee (HELA) in October 2015.


An HSE analysis of local authority (LA) inspection data for 2014/15 also showed a drop of 14% in “total intervention numbers” since the previous year, with an increasing number of local authorities (83) reporting that they carry out no proactive inspections at all.


According to this HSE analysis, “decreasing resources and a more targeted approach to intervention” has led to councils and the businesses they regulate expressing concern about maintaining the competence of LA regulatory staff. The analysis also shows that councils are finding it increasingly difficult to provide an effective regulatory service, with fewer and less experienced officers having to cover “an ever wider range of regulatory duties, beyond health and safety.”


The paper also reveals that the Scottish Procurator Fiscal has raised concerns about the quality of LA-led investigations which subsequently caused difficulties in proceeding with prosecution cases.