Conservatives target “over-the-top” health and safety legislation

The Conservative Party is to conduct a review of health and safety legislation, David Cameron has announced.

Lord David Young will lead the project, which will focus on protecting “Good Samaritans” by extending legal protection for all people acting in good faith and “especially public service professionals”. It will also consider how to alleviate the health and safety oversight of small, local and voluntary organisations and whether to introduce a statutory definition of civil liability for negligence.

In a speech to the Policy Exchange thinktank, the Tory leader said his party would establish clear and specific principles about when health and safety legislation is appropriate and propose practical changes in the law “to end the culture of excessive litigation while at the same time giving legal safeguards to those who need them most”.

Cameron attacked the perception that behind every accident, there is someone who is personally culpable and must pay. “We see it in the commercialising of lawyers' incentives to generate litigation, through the system of enhanced success fees and referral fees which has led to a growth in 'ambulance-chasing',” he added.

The Tory leader added that shadow justice secretary Dominic Grieve and his team were also looking at whether alternative funding arrangements to no-win, no-fee deals were viable.

Warning of a legal “hyper-sensitivity to risk”, he said: “Everyone's so worried about being sued that they invent lots of their own rules on top of the regulations that already exist.”