"New start" loses 76,000 inspections

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has announced "proposals" for what are likely to prove the most fundamental changes to health and safety regulation since the HSW Act 1974. The changes include a cut of one-third (11,000) in the preventive inspections that the HSE takes each year, with the DWP expecting local authorities to follow suit and lose 65,000 inspections. Even the DWP admits this is "a very substantial drop".

The DWP hopes its proposals, which were published on 21 March¹, will provide a "new start" for health and safety regulation, with "a lighter touch approach". Building on the conclusions of Lord Young's 2010 health and safety review, the DWP also advises the following:

• The HSE will recover "all of the costs of an inspection/investigation at which a serious, material breach in standards is diagnosed and a requirement to rectify is formally made, together with the cost of any follow-up work". There will, however, be no charges for businesses that are legally compliant. This, says the DWP, will "make those organisations that gain competitive advantage by flouting the rules pay for the costs of putting things right".
• The start of an "immediate review of health and safety regulation" that will, by autumn 2011, recommend simplifications, as well as "changes that will clarify the legal position of employers in cases where employees act in a grossly irresponsible manner". The review will be chaired by Professor Ragnar Lofstedt, the director of the King's Centre for Risk Management, who will be backed by an "independent" advisory panel that will include "leading politicians with appropriate experience".

Do the right thing?

At the heart of the proposals is a new Health and Safety Framework that the DWP believes "will shift the focus of health and safety activity away from businesses that do the right thing, and concentrate on higher-risk areas and on dealing with serious breaches of health and safety regulation". While the DWP will leave the regulation of the major hazards industries relatively untouched (including nuclear, chemicals and offshore work), it divides the remaining sectors into three groups:

• Sectors that "present comparatively high risk[s]" and where "proactive inspection remains necessary as part of the overall regulatory approach" (for example, construction, waste and recycling, and high-risk manufacturing areas).
• Sectors that are "comparatively high risk but proactive inspection is not considered a useful component of future interventions" and is unlikely to be effective (agriculture, quarries, and health and social care).
• Lower-risk areas where proactive inspection "is not justified in terms of outcomes" and will no longer take place (low-risk manufacturing such as textiles, clothing, footwear, light engineering; electrical engineering; transport; local-authority-administered education provision; electricity generation; and the postal and courier services).

Preventive inspections will therefore be restricted to workplaces in the first group, although the DWP advises that, in groups one and two, the "HSE will continue to undertake inspections for enforcement purposes or to follow up complaints when such intervention appears to be necessary." This, of course, leaves a further question mark over precisely what it will be doing in group three.

An ideological attack

A cut in preventive inspections has been anticipated since the DWP announced in October 2010 that its implementation of the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review would mean a 35% reduction in the HSE's grant in the four years from April 2011. On 8 March, BBC Radio's File on 4 aired a leaked letter from the HSE's chief executive, Geoffrey Podger, which mooted a cut of one-third in preventive inspections². And although the HSE Board chair, Judith Hackitt, was less precise one week later in her speech to the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health 2011 conference, she too admitted that "it is inevitable that the number of inspections we carry out will have to reduce."

The DWP announcement has been greeted with dismay by unions, who believe it will result in an increase in work-related injuries and ill health. As PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka says: "If the government is not prepared to guarantee unannounced inspections in dangerous industries" such as agriculture, quarrying and manufacturing, "they are proving that these cuts are ideological."  

1. DWP (2011), Good Health and Safety, Good for Everyone.

2. "Danger at work", BBC Radio 4, 8 March 2011, transcript.