Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if he will make an assessment of the adequacy of (a) Health and Safety Executive regulations on the interaction between walkers and cattle and (b) how those regulations are communicated to (i) farmers and (ii) the public.

Health and safety legislation places a duty on farmers to manage the risk to the public from cattle as far as it is reasonable to do so.

The nature of modern health and safety legislation is largely goalsetting, rather than prescriptive. This is important for workplaces such as farms where measures that may be reasonable to control risk from cattle on one farm, may not be reasonable on another farm for a variety of reasons.

The legal duty on the farmer under the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 (HSWA) is to manage their cattle herd so the animals within it present a low level of risk to members of the public using fields with public access. Farmers should take all measures that are reasonably practicable to control or reduce risk.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) provides free published guidance to assist farmers in their duties. Guidance sheets AIS17EW (and AIS17S in Scotland) set out the hierarchy of control measures that farmers are expected to consider and, where possible implement.

HSE works closely with key industry stakeholders such as Britain’s Farm Safety Partnerships in a variety of ways to raise awareness within the farming community of their legal duties when considering keeping cattle in fields with public access.

As part of its work to communicate the legal requirements on farmers to members of the public, it has in a number of its media communications and press releases regarding cattle, also drawn attention to The Countryside Code - GOV.UK. This guidance produced by Natural England is aimed at members of the public and provides them with information on how to stay safe in the countryside.