The Strategy of UK Government investigated in the Journal HAZARDS

A new occupational health and safety strategy for Great Britain is jeopardising workers’ health by leaving health and safety enforcement to employers, warns a new report.
Commission impossible: A new enforcement-lite, cut price safety disaster1 says the government’s Health and Safety Commission (HSC) is moving towards business “self-regulation” of health and safety at a time when Britain has seen the worst spate of workplace safety tragedies in over a decade, many of which – including Morecambe Bay and Stockline Plastics - have been linked to a lack of rigorous safety enforcement.

HSC's 2004 Strategy for workplace health and safety in Great Britain to 2010 and beyond, includes an explicit commitment not to enforce criminal laws covering workplace safety, with the regulatory body instead “providing effective support free from the fear of enforcement.
In what must be a world first for an official workplace safety agency, HSC has an explicit commitment to “robust” action to tackle those who are “over-zealous” over health and safety. HSC adds it will discourage use of resources “where the risks are of low significance, well understood and properly managed”.

The Commission Impossible report, published in this month’s edition of the safety journal Hazards, says workplace safety is already dangerously unenforced, with fewer than one in five major injuries investigated and workplaces not judged high risk unlikely to have an inspector call in a working lifetime.

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