Health and safety reviews

The government has used two reviews to justify its attacks on health and safety legislation and the safety inspection and enforcement regime. The first, Lord Young’s 2010 Common sense: Common safety, was originally commissioned by David Cameron when he was leader of the opposition and then became a government review.

The report set out 36 recommendations, including the following:

• restricting advertising for “no win, no fee” compensation claims and changing the way personal injury claims are handled;

• extending the road traffic accident (RTA) personal injury scheme to include other personal injury claims through a three-stage procedure for lower value claims, with fixed costs for each stage;

• examining the option of capping RTA personal injury claims to £25,000;

• looking at the procedure for ‘low-hazard’ workplaces such as offices, classrooms and shops;

• exempting employers from carrying out risk assessments for home workers in ‘low-hazard environments’;

• exempting the self-employed in “low-hazard businesses” from risk assessments;

• accrediting health and safety consultants and introducing a directory of accredited consultants;

• simplifying the process for taking children on school trips by introducing a single consent form to cover all activities a child may undertake at school; simplifying risk assessments for classrooms; shifting to a system of risk-benefit assessment; and reviewing the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 to separate out play and leisure from workplace settings;

• consolidating all current health and safety regulations into a single set of regulations;

• reviewing the operation of the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1995 (RIDDOR) and extending the period away from work or unable to perform their normal work duties ,before an injury or accident should be reported from over three to seven days;

• abolishing the Adventure Activities Licensing Authority and replacing licensing with a code of practice;

• stopping insurance companies from requiring businesses operating in “low-hazard” environments to employ health and safety consultants to carry out full health and safety risk assessments;

• requiring officials who ban events on health and safety grounds to put their reasons in writing and for those affected to have a route for redress;

• enhancing the role of the HSE in large multi-site retail businesses;

• combining local authority food safety and health and safety inspections; and

• ensuring that police officers and firefighters are not at risk of investigation or prosecution “as a result of committing a heroic act.”

The government reported that it had implemented 23 of the 35 recommendations by February 2013 and the changes are set out throughout this booklet.