Health and Safety System

Lord Grayling Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2011 Written Statements

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Chris Grayling)]

The Government are committed to a health and safety regime that is fair, balanced and proportionate. Sensible health and safety at work helps to maintain a healthy and productive work force and contributes to economic prosperity. The burden of health and safety red tape has, however, become too great, with too many inspections of relatively low risk and good performing work places, frequently poor health and safety advice to businesses from badly qualified consultants, and a complex structure for regulation. To address these issues, the Government are today publishing their plans for the reform of the health and safety system.

We will clamp down on the rogue health and safety advisers who cost industry so much money by providing advice which often bears little relation to the actual requirements of legislation. To achieve this we have launched an official occupational safety and health consultants register for those health and safety practitioners who are properly accredited to one of the professional bodies in the industry. Those who do not have the requisite expertise and experience will be excluded from the register, making it easier for employers to access reliable, reputable advice. I am pleased to announce that the register will be open for the use of employers from today.

We will shift the focus of health and safety activity away from businesses that do the right thing, and instead concentrate efforts on higher risk areas and on dealing with serious breaches of health and safety regulation. Those organisations which pose a lesser risk and which meet their legal responsibilities will be left free of unwarranted scrutiny. This will mean a very substantial drop in the number of health and safety inspections carried out in Britain. We will also shift the cost burden of health and safety away from the taxpayer, and instead make those organisations that fail to meet their obligations pay to put things right.

We will seek to clarify and simplify health and safety legislation, and in doing so ease the burden on business. We are today launching new “Health and Safety Made Simple” guidance to provide lower-risk small and medium-sized businesses with the essential information they need to achieve a basic level of health and safety management in their work place in a single, easy-to-use, package. We are also launching an immediate review of health and safety regulation overseen by an independent advisory panel chaired by Professor Ragnar Löfstedt, director of the King’s centre for risk management at King’s college London. The review will be asked to make recommendations by autumn 2011 for simplifying the current rules. We will also ask the review to consider whether changes to legislation are needed to clarify the position of employers in cases where employees act in a grossly irresponsible manner.

Further details are available on the Department for Work and Pensions website at www.dwp.gov.uk/policy/health-and-safety. The latest progress on the implementation of the recommendations of Lord Young’s report “Common Sense, Common Safety” can be found on the same website.