Member Article

Looking at the red tape “blitz“

Helen Brooks, Partner specialising in Health and Safety at Charles Russell’s Employment and Pensions Group, looks at the recent announcements on health and safety regulations.

This week the Government announced that it will be making changes to health and safety legislation as part of its red tape blitz aimed at boosting growth by introducing new rules which will exempt significant numbers of businesses from proactive health and safety inspections and by removing strict liability offences from health and safety legislation.

The intention is that from April 2013 health and safety inspections will be limited to businesses operating in higher risk areas such as construction, chemical industries or gas fitting and installation or where there has been an accident, a genuine employee complaint or the organisation has a track record of poor performance in health and safety. The Government will be introducing a new binding statutory Code, which will be consulted on later this month, under which HSE will direct all Local Authority inspections and which will rule out proactive inspections of low-risk businesses such as those which are office-based, shops, hotels, restaurants, pubs and clubs. Reducing these time-consuming and costly inspections currently carried out on all businesses by either Local Authority or HSE inspectors and concentrating on higher risk areas is a sensible and cost-effective solution for all.

The Government is also proposing to introduce draft legislation in October 2012 aimed at ensuring businesses will only be held liable for civil damages in health and safety cases if they can be shown to have acted negligently. This means that employers who have complied with their health and safety duties will no longer be automatically liable for damages, as is the case at the moment. This change is aimed at helping to deal effectively with “compensation culture” claims made on a “no win, no fee” basis. Again, limiting the liability of those who take their health and safety responsibilities seriously and ensuring that only those who are failing to do so are liable makes business sense and may, perhaps, also encourage compliance.

Both of these initiatives were also announced in the Budget as part of the Government’s stated intention to “scrap or improve” 84% of current health and safety legislation. This also follows on from the Government’s Red Tape Challenge and the reviews it commissioned from Lord Young and Professor Lofstedt into reducing the burden of health and safety on business and addressing the compensation culture as a means of helping to stimulate economic growth. Government research has found that health and safety is a top concern overall for employers with 13% identifying it as the biggest recruitment deterrent and of particular concern to micro-businesses. These changes are clearly a step in the right direction to help low-risk law-abiding businesses concentrate on growth and have been applauded by organisations such as the Institute of Directors and the British Chambers of Commerce. These changes are also likely to be uniformly welcomed by employers.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Helen Brooks .