The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) welcomed the publication of Lord Young’s report into health and safety.
Prime Minister David Cameron and the Cabinet have accepted all of the recommendations put forward by Lord Young, who will continue to work across departments to ensure his recommendations are carried through. Lord Young says that his Common Sense, Common Safety puts forward a series of policies for improving the perception of health and safety, to ensure it is taken seriously by employers and the general public, while ensuring the burden on small business is as insignificant as possible. You can view the full 58-page report on the Number 10 website.<br><br>The report also calls for restrictions on advertising for “no win, no fee” compensation claims and a revolution in the way personal injury claims are handled.<br><br>Welcoming the report, the Mr Cameron said: “Good health and safety is vitally important. But all too often good, straightforward legislation designed to protect people from major hazards has been extended inappropriately to cover every walk of life, no matter how low risk. A damaging compensation culture has arisen, as if people can absolve themselves from any personal responsibility for their own actions, with the spectre of lawyers only too willing to pounce with a claim for damages on the slightest pretext.<br><br>“We simply cannot go on like this. That’s why I asked Lord Young to do this review and put some common sense back into health and safety. And that’s exactly what he has done.”<br><br>Among the key recommendations is to extend the simplified Road Traffic Accident Personal Injury Scheme to include other personal injury claims. This would provide a simple three-stage procedure for lower value claims, accessible via the internet, with fixed costs for each stage.<br><br>Lord Young also proposes what he terms a common sense approach to educational trips, which currently entail a plethora of forms to fill in, deterring teachers and others who work with children from arranging any trips at all. He recommends a single consent form covering all activities a child might undertake at school.<br><br>The HSE says that it has already been working with others to develop responses to two of the recommendations:<br><br>• a 20-minute online risk assessment for offices, which was launched today, with other web tools for similarly low-risk workplaces to follow <br>• a new Occupational Safety Consultants Register (OSCR), which will be set up in January 2011.<br><br>Judith Hackitt, the HSE Chair, said: “Lord Young’s report is an important milestone on the road to recovery for the reputation of real health and safety. HSE welcomes it and will be actively pursuing those recommendations within our remit.<br><br>“We welcomed the review when it was announced by the Prime Minister in June and we are looking forward to contributing to its implementation.<br><br>“Publication of the report is a tremendous opportunity to refocus health and safety on what it is really about – managing workplace risks. Getting this right is good for employers, employees and Britain as a whole.<br><br>“We’ve been saying for some time that health and safety is being used by too many people as a convenient excuse to hide behind. Often it is invoked to disguise somebody’s motives – concerns over costs or complexity, an unwillingness to defend an unpopular decision or simple laziness. Lord Young is sweeping these excuses away.<br><br>“HSE will continue to champion a sensible and proportionate approach to dealing with serious risks in the workplace – not eliminating every minor risk from everyday life.”<br><br>The Occupational Safety Consultants Register will provide firms with details of consultants who have met the highest qualification standard of recognised professional bodies and who are bound by a code of conduct that requires them to give advice which is sensible and proportionate.<br><br>The 20-minute online risk assessment will help employers in office-based environments to consider relevant hazards and think about how they control them. It will also help employers to avoid unnecessary paperwork and bureaucracy. The online tool works by prompting employers to answer a series of questions about their workplace and then generates a unique risk assessment with series of actions. Similar online tools for other low risk workplaces are also being developed. The online risk assessment tool for offices can be found at www.hse.gov.uk/risk/office.htm
A health and safety international body – IOSH (Institution of Occupational Safety and Health) – said it broadly welcomed Lord Young’s recommendations.
IOSH Chief Executive Rob Strange said: "We warmly welcome this review. We are sick and tired of hearing of misinterpretations of health and safety laws which end in the cancellation of perfectly safe activities.
"Lord Young is absolutely right: The standing of health and safety has been lowered by ridiculous applications of the rules. This has to end. We think this review could see a turning point for health and safety in the UK by turning the focus away from daft decisions about conker competitions and hanging baskets and back onto saving people’s lives in genuinely hazardous areas of work and public life."
Lord Young said the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act remains an "effective framework" and had brought about the lowest number of non-fatal accidents and second lowest number of fatal accidents at work in Europe. But health and safety had been given a bad name, said the former Government minister, by misinterpretations of the rules.
Mr Strange said: "It’s a little early to comment on the specific recommendations made by Lord Young, which have been made public only this morning. But we do think the Government is broadly on the right track and we will support it in whatever way we can."
Jason Anker, 42, of Farndon, in Nottinghamshire, was paralysed in 1992 when the ladder he was on slipped and fell between two buildings. He has had an 18-year-struggle to get his life back on track, including lengthy spells in hospital, the collapse of his marriage, drink and drug problems, and compensation issues which were only resolved in 2007.
Jason is backing IOSH in raising awareness about the dangers of poor health and safety.
He said: "Health and safety does have a bad image because people presume it’s about rules and restrictions. At the end of the day, it’s about saving lives and preventing accidents at work.
If the laws in 1992 were as tight as they are now I would be standing, not sitting in a wheelchair, saying this today."
Download the Young report at –
