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In addition to improving regulatory “housekeeping”, the Löfstedt Review of health and safety must consider how businesses - particularly smaller firms - can be helped to avoid accidents and ill health, says the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents.

RoSPA is contributing to the review, led by Professor Ragnar Löfstedt of King’s College London, which is considering opportunities for “reducing the burden of health and safety legislation on UK businesses while maintaining the progress made in improving health and safety outcomes”. The review is focusing on approximately 200 statutory instruments and approved codes of practice, rather than the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 or other primary legislation. It is expected to report by the end of October.

Roger Bibbings, RoSPA’s occupational safety adviser, said: “RoSPA welcomes any attempt to try to ‘tidy up’ the law where its elegance and flow have become confused, as we have seen through adaptations to implement European directives. However, the real challenge Prof Löfstedt faces is not just showing how we can ensure better regulatory housekeeping, without reducing essential protections, but how we can ensure that we have an effective health and safety support system to help businesses to comply with essential requirements.

“Good laws and guidance are clearly necessary but they are far from sufficient to deliver safe and healthy working conditions by themselves. To ensure a ‘fine fit’ between systems or standards and operational reality, you also need an effective ‘health and safety culture’. Nationally and sectorally, we need effective systems of promotion, education, training, advice and support, particularly to enable smaller businesses to respond effectively. Of course, we also need enforcement to deal with the criminally non-compliant.”

He continued: “The Government will insist, with justification, that any proposals from Prof Löfstedt pass what is called the ‘small firms test’. There is continuing debate about whether there is some sort of size threshold in today’s businesses below which ideas about formal risk management have no meaning in practice. We and most other stakeholders in the health and safety system continue to argue that it is the level of risk to workers, and to others, and not the size of the organisation, that must be the guiding principle.

“Therefore, Prof Löfstedt and his colleagues will need to consider not just whether current risk management duties in law are suitably comprehensive and generic but whether they are ‘scaleable’ in different settings. Only then will it be meaningful to look at how to organise more effectively the large amount of regulatory detail that has accumulated since 1974 and particularly after 1992.

“The review must be evidence based and it should also consider the outcomes of previous reviews of regulation.”  

RoSPA believes the Löfstedt Review will need to co-ordinate closely with other ongoing “simplification” initiatives, including the Government’s Red Tape Challenge and a wider project by the Health and Safety Executive that is looking at more than 2,000 guidance documents. Information about the review is available at www.dwp.gov.uk and RoSPA’s full submission will be uploaded to the RoSPA website in due course.

Since 2007, RoSPA’s National Occupational Safety and Health Committee has been conducting an inquiry into health and safety help available to small firms. Full details are at www.rospa.com/occupationalsafety/adviceandinformation/smallfirmshealthandsafety/inquiry/.