Government to review health and safety laws

[enaid]

Government to review health and safety laws



Veteran Conservative politician David Young will carry out a government-wide review into health and safety laws and the growth of a "compensation culture," Prime Minister Cameron's office said on Monday.
Young, appointed adviser to the prime minister on health and safety law and practice, will investigate concerns over how health and safety laws are applied and report back to Cameron in the summer, the government said.
Young will then work with government departments to bring his proposals into effect.
"The rise of the compensation culture over the last 10 years is a real concern, as is the way health and safety rules are sometimes applied," Cameron said in a statement.
"We need a sensible new approach that makes clear these laws are intended to protect people, not overwhelm businesses with red tape. I look forward to receiving Lord Young's recommendations on how we can best achieve that." The Conservatives had already announced last December that Lord Young, who held several cabinet posts in Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s, would conduct an audit of health and safety legislation.
Cameron promised before the May election to reform Britain's "over-the-top" health and safety culture, saying it had become a straitjacket on personal initiative and responsibility.
He cited newspaper stories about children being made to wear goggles by their head teacher to play conkers. Unions accused him of peddling myths and urged politicians not to undermine a consensus over health and safety.
Cameron has also attacked a growing compensation culture, with highly publicised claims for injuries creating a legal "hypersensitivity" to risk and accidents.
http://uk.mg40.mail.yahoo.com/dc/lau...=7fiulmn6hqeb7

[enaid]

Re: Government to review health and safety laws

Just wonderd about your experience of 'Health and Safety' rules, do you think it has gone too far on many things?

[Amy]

Re: Government to review health and safety laws

Thank God for that!

[Paule]

Re: Government to review health and safety laws

I remember when Health & Safety was called Common Sense.

[Amy]

Re: Government to review health and safety laws

I've heard of living in a box. But living in a wheelie bin is plain daft

By Richard Littlejohn
Last updated at 10:29 AM on 15th June 2010



At the risk of coming over all have I Got News For You, this week's featured guest publication is Materials Recycling Week, the magazine for waste management professionals.

The latest edition carries a report on new guidelines from the health and Safety executive and the Waste Industry Safety and health (WISH) Forum. Note the clever way in which the words 'health' and 'safety' have been reversed to form the catchy acronym WISH. If they had stuck with the more normal nomenclature, they'd have ended up with WIHS, which wouldn't have had the same ring to it.

I digress. This is a serious business. The advice is called 'People In Commercial Waste Containers' and is intended to help dustmen 'detect anyone inside bins before they are emptied'. It was drawn up after an incident in Brighton in which a teacher from New Zealand was crushed to death - the waste management industry's answer to Blair Peach.

Scott Williams had crawled into a communal wheelie bin to sleep off the effects of a pub crawl. The refuse crew failed to spot him lying among the rubbish and he was fed into the crusher. His remains were discovered more than 24 hours later at a recycling site in Newhaven. Undoubtedly, this was a tragic accident, best chalked up to 'death by misadventure'. Dustmen clearly can't be expected to poke around in the contents of every bin on the off-chance that they might find a drunk taking a nap.

But that's exactly what they are going to have to do in future. Following the macabre demise of Mr Williams, and the discovery of two other bodies in refuse containers, the full apparatus of elf 'n'safety cranked laboriously into action. According to Materials Recycling Week: 'There are even more cases of people being found in bins before they are emptied.' These are described by the HSE as 'near-misses'.

Head of waste management and recycling, Geoff Cox, said: 'These most often involve those who are vulnerable either through drink or through seeking shelter. 'But they are preventable. Those who produce the waste, are responsible for storing it or collecting it, all have an essential role to play in reducing the likelihood of any further tragic deaths. 'We fully recognise that seeking shelter in a bin may be preferable to risking it on the street in all weathers, but we want people to understand what the tragic consequences of that can be. We encourage those who are sleeping rough to look after themselves and to look out for each other, too.'

How many winos - sorry, those who are vulnerable through drink - do you imagine subscribe to Materials Recycling Week or carry out a checklist of WISH guidelines before deciding where to bed down for the night? From now on, local authorities will be required to perform a risk assessment before emptying bins, taking into consideration areas where there are known to be rough sleepers, the weather and the nature of the refuse.

In the first instance, this amounts to banging on the bin. But the guidance states: 'In some circumstances, the person may be intoxicated or injured, so that banging on the bin may be insufficient to rouse them.' Consequently, before tipping the bin on to the truck, it must also be banged down hard on the ground.

It has taken not one, but two, quangos to come up with this brilliant advice. Goodness knows how much time and money went into it. this is what Lord Young will find himself up against as he begins his mission to cut the elf 'n'safety monster down to size.

It isn't just the headline stories about children having to wear goggles to play conkers, the problem is institutionalised. Elf'n'safety is a giant job-creation scheme, constantly striving to justify its own existence.

We all agree that sensible precautions should be taken wherever possible, but the official view is that all risk must be eliminated. There is no perceived problem which doesn't have a complicated bureaucratic solution, regardless of the inherent contradictions.

While WISH is now insisting that dustmen bang on the side of all bins, it's not that long since a dead body lay undisturbed for three weeks in a wheelie bin in Surrey because it was deemed too heavy to lift.

In that case, which came to court recently, the guidelines were designed to prevent dustmen putting their backs out and suing for compensation. Elf 'n'safety exists in a parallel universe, a utopian fantasy island where nothing bad must be allowed to happen, even accidentally.

When a tragedy does occur, the response is always utterly out of all proportion. The death of one, or even three people, is regrettable. But how many others will be prevented by imposing costly and time-consuming measures across the board? In the context of an overall population of 60 million and rising, how many people are actually living in wheelie bins? Tell-tale signs include a washing line, a satellite dish and a rottweiler on a string tethered to the handle. Dustmen are advised to knock three times on the lid before emptying. Soon, all wheelie bins will be required to carry signs warning that anyone who decides to sleep therein may be crushed to death. The next thing you know, householders and businesses will be taken to court and fined thousands of pounds for failing to lock their bin lids to prevent 'vulnerable' people gaining access.

A while ago, I described how I stumbled across a couple of Eastern European immigrants living in a superloo in Stamford Hill, north London. Perhaps they had previously been dossing down in a wheelie bin in Hackney, until their name came up on the waiting list for a des res in a public toilet.

They may never know what a lucky escape they had. I've heard of Living In A Box...

[MIKE770]

Re: Government to review health and safety laws

I remember when Health & Safety was called Common Sense.

Health & Safety took over Common Sense - hope we get back to Common Sense. A lot less stupidity.

[righty]

Re: Government to review health and safety laws

It's not the laws that are wrong its the way the jobsworth's interpret them

People are entitled to go about their daily business without being injured so if the councils/employers or the hospitals want to stop people claiming damages (which is all they can do) then they only need to make their roads/pavements/public places/factories/workplaces/hospitals safe to use

[enaid]

Re: Government to review health and safety laws

Danger! Daft health and safety laws under inspection

Lord Young should put common sense back into our health and safety laws, says Philip Johnston.




By Philip Johnston
Published: 8:28AM BST 15 Jun 2010


Lord Young will revamp Britain's health and safety laws Photo: Tom Stockill


For 16 years, Hilaire Purbrick lived in a 7ft cave that he had dug out of rock on his allotment in Brighton. Largely isolated from the outside world and surviving on what he grew on the land, he caused no one any bother. Until, that is, Brighton & Hove City Council stepped in. It had Mr Purbrick's dwelling checked by the fire brigade, which discovered – surprise, surprise – that it did not have enough exits; so an injunction was sought against Mr Purbrick, 45, banning him from entering the cave on the grounds of health and safety.

Mr Purbrick is unquestionably eccentric; he may even have been squatting on land that he does not own, and this was a ruse by the council to get him off it. However, the idea that he cannot live in a cave because it has no fire exits simply defies belief. It is one of those stories that over the years has had us all shaking our heads in bewilderment and asking how, and why, we have become so preposterously risk-averse. As Lord Young of Graffham, the former Tory chairman who has been asked to carry out a review of health and safety laws, says, they have become a joke and a rich source of material for the "you couldn't make it up" school of journalism.

And sometimes you really couldn't. "Elfin safety" has become synonymous with petty bureaucracy, over-regulation and the rise of the jackbooted jobsworth. Complying with the regulations is also hugely costly to businesses and, by extension, the wider economy. On the other hand, it is very expensive for businesses that fail to take the proper precautions to minimise danger. In recent weeks, a major supermarket chain was fined £95,000 for fire safety lapses, a pub chain was penalised when a child received an electric shock, a company faces a £200,000 fine for a fitter's death and a fatal hangar roof fall cost another business £148,000.

If health and safety regulation is needed, it is important that it is proportionate and sensible. There is no doubt that rules are needed in many walks of life; the question is whether it is necessary to apply them quite so rigorously to everything we do. Throughout history, health and safety laws have often been a response to appalling tragedies, as in 1862 when the beam of a pumping engine at Hartley Colliery in Northumberland broke and blocked the only mineshaft and means of ventilation and miners suffocated underground. Two years later, new mining legislation required that every seam in a mine should have at least two shafts or outlets. Such laws continue to be passed to this day as specific dangers manifest themselves with the advance of technology.
But the overarching legislation is the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act which brought together some 30 Acts and 500 sets of regulations following the recommendations of the Robens Committee. This unified system covered millions of workers previously unprotected by safety laws and the results are indisputably positive. In 1974 there were 651 fatal workplace injuries; in 2008-09, there were 180, while over this period the size of the workforce rose by 12 per cent.
Although this decline coincides with the contraction of British heavy industry, Britain's annual rate of workplace fatalities is now the second lowest in the EU. A cautious estimate is that over 5,000 lives have been saved by health and safety improvements since the 1974 Act.
So how did legislation that over the decades was directed at protecting those seen as most vulnerable, and which helped introduce safe practices for all workers, become an all-encompassing regime that stops people who change clocks from climbing ladders, requires Christmas trees to be kept behind barriers and prevents pantomime performers from throwing sweets to children in the audience?
Part of the problem lies in the scope of the 1974 Act. It laid down general duties that had not existed before, rather than specific obligations to deal with particular safety issues modelled on duties under the common law. There is a general duty on every employer "to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of all his employees" and to "conduct his undertaking in such a way as to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that persons not in his employment who may be affected thereby are not thereby exposed to risks to their health and safety".
The 1974 Act was not meant to be overly prescriptive. Almost at every point, Parliament inserted the words "so far as is reasonably practicable". The trouble is that what might have been considered reasonable in the mid-Seventies is seen as downright reckless today.
It is here where the source of "health and safety gone mad" can be found. Employers have to look at every activity in which they are involved and judge the potential dangers. Get it wrong and they face being fined by the HSE or sued by an employee or a member of the public. Yet many of these rules, unlike those that protected miners or construction workers, often have no obvious benefit. But the boxes must be ticked.
Where does it stop? Where should it stop? Nowadays, every public and private body has risk managers or health and safety staff whose job is to assess the circumstances that might lead to their employees suing if all reasonably practicable steps to mitigate risk have not been taken. Given the difficulties of deciding what is reasonable and practicable, it is considered better to seek to eliminate risk altogether by stopping the activities that may give rise to it.
As Lord Young said yesterday, we have abandoned our common sense; but this is not the result of some collective insanity. It is because we live in a world that tries to anticipate every possible contingency through a rule. This "health and safety" culture has even led to the creation of a ladder-awareness course, which costs over £200, a sum paid by the taxpayer or the consumer depending on whether the ladder user works in the public or private sector. Meanwhile, there is an army of inspectors who carry out checks to ensure ladders are safe; notes of the inspection have to be documented, and the paperwork has to be kept for three months. Something that had been commonsensical has morphed into something bureaucratic, expensive and time-consuming that treats grown-ups like children.
The problem with risk-aversion is that it results in over-regulation and excessive caution, such that even police officers who would once have stepped in to help people under threat are expected to conduct a safety assessment before doing so. If we try to eliminate all risk, then individual responsibility and common sense go out of the door with it. Yet, if anything, people today are even more adventurous than their forefathers, jumping off mountain tops with a parachute and backpacking through hazardous places. Young people who cannot use Blu-Tack without wearing goggles, as pupils at one school were told, indulge in terrifying new crazes such as free-running and building-jumping.
Did we really intend to produce a world in which an actor playing Nelson during a Battle of Trafalgar commemoration should be required to wear a life-jacket over his costume? Since the answer to that question is clearly "no", what can Lord Young do about it? He may rail against a risk-averse culture and lament the passing of common sense, but he can't change EU directives which are responsible for many of the regulations and it is questionable whether he can do anything about the law firms that encourage anyone involved in an accident to pursue damages on a no-win, no-fee basis.
Margaret Thatcher once said that Lord Young, unlike other ministers, brought her solutions, not problems; and reversing a 40-year retreat away from sensible safety precautions to the madness we often see today may well be his most difficult task so far. But at least, and at last, someone is going to have a try.

[righty]

Re: Government to review health and safety laws

"it is very expensive for businesses that fail to take the proper precautions to minimise danger. In recent weeks, a major supermarket chain was fined £95,000 for fire safety lapses, a pub chain was penalised when a child received an electric shock, a company faces a £200,000 fine for a fitter's death and a fatal hangar roof fall cost another business £148,000"

& the point is what exactly? that just because its expensive (or so say them) these firms should NOT be penalized & allowed to put people at risk without any form of sanction.

Its a fact that if at the outset an employer or business considers the well being of his employees & customers the costs of H&S can & will be drastically reduced. Its only costly to those playing catch up (usually after the event) or those, many of them household names, who only pay lip service to H&S

[Amy]

Re: Government to review health and safety laws

At the risk of stating the obvious, I think the whole point of the thread was to highlight the nonsensical Health and Safety rules. The ones for instance that would seem to serve no purpose other than for some jobsworth to justify his existence.

For example people standing around a virtual bonfire on bonfire night with speakers playing the sound of crackling wood because it would be too expensive to hire the barriers and crowd controls that H&SE insist on.

Or possibly the H&SE requesting handrails to be fitted to footpaths lest the ramblers fall over or the banning of hanging baskets lest they fall and hit someone over the head.

Or perhaps it could be the chopping down and wanton destruction of chestnut trees which would then eradicate those terrible conker injuries sustained by children playing with them that fill A&E around September time.

[righty]

Re: Government to review health and safety laws

At the risk of stating the obvious, I think the whole point of the thread was to highlight the nonsensical Health and Safety rules. The ones for instance that would seem to serve no purpose other than for some jobsworth to justify his existence.

For example people standing around a virtual bonfire on bonfire night with speakers playing the sound of crackling wood because it would be too expensive to hire the barriers and crowd controls that H&SE insist on. Wrong the law doesn't require this only the idiot local council jobsworth does

Or possibly the H&SE requesting handrails to be fitted to footpaths lest the ramblers fall over or the banning of hanging baskets lest they fall and hit someone over the head. Wrong again it's not the law its the local council jobsworth who wants to make a name for themselves

Or perhaps it could be the chopping down and wanton destruction of chestnut trees which would then eradicate those terrible conker injuries sustained by children playing with them that fill A&E around September time.

Again the work of the local jobsworth who incidentally probably has little understanding of proper H&S I know cos in that past I've worked alongside them

Like I said it's not the laws that need a overhaul its the way some idiot jobsworths interpret them

[Amy]

Re: Government to review health and safety laws

I think you need to read my post properly. I said "nonsensical Health and Safety rules" in my first paragraph. I did not say "laws" anywhere. You did.

Like I said, I think the thread was started to highlight stupid rules and regulations and that included those implemented by the local jobsworth at the council.

[righty]

Re: Government to review health and safety laws

I think you need to read my post properly. I said "nonsensical Health and Safety rules" in my first paragraph. I did not say "laws" anywhere. You did.

Like I said, I think the thread was started to highlight stupid rules and regulations and that included those implemented by the local jobsworth at the council.

& I was making the point there are NO stupid rules or regulations only some of those who enforce them

The fact that some confuse the two, particularly in the media, causes what are sensible rules & regulation to be brought into disrepute

[Celestine]

Re: Government to review health and safety laws

I doubt much will change in reality......

Because 'local government' is treated as an extension of central government, audit processes force every officers decision to abide by the letter of the HSE guidance.

The HSE is much tougher on local government, because LG is meant to 'set an example' of good practise.

Health and safety in local government

In the private sector, there is more freedom to interpret the guidance sensibly. In local government, you are rarely given the choice.

Decent individuals give it a bloody good try though.........

[Celestine]

Re: Government to review health and safety laws

A perfect example......

What is being asked for will take a lot of time and resources....yet HAS to done.

Managing the safety of burial ground memorials