Health & Safety Executive handed beefed-up role in relation to local authorities

The role of the Health & Safety Executive in relation to local authorities is to be “significantly strengthened”, ministers have claimed.

Responding to an independent report by Professor Ragnar Löfstedt, Reclaiming health and safety for all: An independent review of health and safety legislation, the government said the HSE would work with local government and business to develop a shared national code that is “binding and enforceable”.

This will help ensure local government takes a more consistent and proportionate approach to enforcement, ministers argued.

However, the government appeared to be shying away from implementing Professor Löfstedt’s recommendation in full.

The Professor, a senior academic at King’s College, London, had called for the HSE to be given the authority to direct all local authority health and safety inspection and enforcement activity. Such a move would have required a change in legislation.

The Löfstedt report argued that allowing the HSE to direct local authorities’ activities in this way would ensure the work was “consistent and targeted towards the most risky workplaces”.

Professor Löfstedt found that there were examples of the HSE and local authorities working well together. However, his report claimed that there continued to be concerns over inconsistency in the implementation of health and safety regulation across local authorities.

“Furthermore, by allowing each enforcing authority to only consider the workplaces within their area of control, the current regulatory arrangements generate an artificial barrier to the most efficient targeting of enforcement activity across the board,” it said.

The Löfstedt report acknowledged that a transfer of responsibility to the HSE might risk losing the synergies with other local authority enforcement responsibilities. But it insisted that this “would ensure that activity is independent of local priorities and concerns and clarify the distinction between health and safety and other regulatory issues such as food safety and environmental protection”.

This would, in turn, provide greater assurance and consistency for businesses, it argued.

In its response, the government said it fully supported the “overall objectives” of the recommendation. But it added that: “At the same time, in our effort to address deficiencies in the system we must not create an even more centralised approach that is further removed from local businesses and communities.”

“There remains an important role for local inspectors to use their knowledge and experience to engage with businesses across a range of regulatory issues.”

The government also said that further improvements to the Primary Authority scheme – which is designed to address inconsistencies across local government boundaries – would be announced soon.

The response added: “We believe that strengthening the HSE's policy role for all aspects of health and safety enforcement will deliver better targeted inspections and deliver greater consistency for business.

“It will also help to address the ‘twin peak’ issue and provide the platform for a single regulatory approach to health and safety across Britain. We welcome the HSE working closely with the Local Better Regulation Office, who operate the Primary Authority Scheme, to ensure that Primary Authority can help deliver reductions in burdens, and increased consistency of approach, in line with HSE policy.”

Ministers meanwhile said they would work with local government to improve the quality of training and “dispel myths and the fear of litigation, which is why many councils can be over-cautious with their inspections”.

It said this would happen “at pace and to a published timetable” so that business could see real and immediate improvements.

The government response said ministers accepted all of the other report’s key recommendations. This will lead to a “major cut back” of health and safety regulation from as early as January 2012. This overhaul will follow a consultation on abolishing large numbers of regulations.

The first rules will be removed from the statute book within a matter of months, the Department for Work & Pensions said.

The target is to remove a third of the 200 or so health and safety regulations, “rising to a half”, over the next three years.

The government also plans to set up – from 1 January – a so-called challenge panel “which will allow businesses to get the decisions of health and safety inspectors overturned immediately if they have got it wrong”.

The Löfstedt report also recommended – and the government has accepted – that:

• Health and safety law should not apply to self-employed people whose work activity poses no potential risk of harm to others
• The HSE should review all of its Approved Codes of Practice. The initial phase of this review should be completed by June 2012
• The government should work more closely with the European Commission and others, particularly with the planned review of EU health and safety legislation in 2013, to ensure that new and existing EU health and safety legislation is risk-based and evidence-based
• The HSE should conduct a programme of sector-specific consolidations to be completed by April 2015. The aim is to update requirements and make them simpler to understand
• The original intention of the pre-action protocol standard disclosure (Woolf) lists should be clarified by the Civil Procedure Rule Committee and restated
• Regulatory provisions which impose strict liability should be reviewed by June 2013 and either qualified with ‘reasonably practicable’ where strict liability is not absolutely necessary or amended to prevent civil liability from attaching to a breach of those provisions.

The report concluded that the general sweep of requirements set out in health and safety regulation were broadly fit for purpose, but that a few offered little benefit and should be removed, clarified or simplified.

But the main problem, it said, was that regulatory requirements were “misunderstood and applied inappropriately”.

Professor Löfstedt said his reforms sought to address this by ensuring all key elements of the regulatory and legal system were “better targeted towards risk and support the proper management of health and safety instead of a focus on trying to cover every possible risk and  accumulating paperwork”.

Ministers are also set to follow one of the Professor’s recommendations by urging the European Commission to adopt “a more proportionate, risk-based” approach. Approximately half of all health and safety regulation comes from Brussels.

Employment Minister Chris Grayling said: "From the beginning we said getting the regulation of health and safety right is important to everyone. By accepting the recommendations of Professor Löfstedt we are putting common sense back at the heart of health and safety. Our reforms will root out needless bureaucracy and be a significant boost to the million self employed people who will be moved out of health and safety regulation altogether.

"We will also ensure our reforms put an emphasis on personal responsibility. It cannot be right that employers are responsible for damages when they have done all they can to manage the risk. Fundamentally we will ensure the health and safety system is fit for purpose through streamlining the maze of regulations and ensuring consistency across the board."

Judith Hackitt, Chair of HSE, said the Löfstedt report would go a long way to refocusing health and safety in Great Britain on the things that matter, namely “supporting those who want to do the right thing and reducing rates of work-related death, injury and ill health”.

She said: “We must have a system of health and safety which enables employers to make sensible and proportionate decisions about managing genuine workplace risks. Simplifying and streamlining the stock of regulations, focusing enforcement on higher risk businesses, clarifying requirements, and rebalancing the civil litigation system – these are all practical, positive steps.”

Hackitt acknowledged that poor regulation, that which adds unnecessary bureaucracy with no real benefits, drove out confidence in good regulation.

"We welcome these reforms because they are good for workers and employers but also for the significant contribution they will make to restoring the rightful reputation of real health and safety,” she said.

A copy of the Löfstedt report and the government's response can be downloaded here.

Philip Hoult