Hot on the heels of Lord Young’s review, in which he confirms the establishment of an accreditation scheme for health and safety consultants, the HSE has issued more information on how the scheme will work.
The Occupational Safety Consultants Register (OSCR) will go live in January next year and will provide firms with details of consultants who “have met the highest qualification standard of recognised professional bodies, and who are bound by a professional code of conduct that require them to only give advice that is sensible and proportionate”.
As reported previously on shponline, the scheme will initially be run by the HSE, with the support of the professional bodies representing safety consultants across Britain, including IOSH and the CIEH. The scheme will be managed by the professional bodies themselves through a not-for-profit company, with the HSE providing support. A website will be set up where employers can find local advisors with experience relevant to their sector.
Judith Hackitt, the HSE chair, said: “Lord Young quite rightly recognised that businesses find it difficult to know when they need expert safety advice, and where to go to get it. The Occupational Safety Consultants Register will make it easier to identify consultants who meet the highest standards within their professional bodies.
“There are already many very good safety consultants who give sensible advice to employers – the register will help recognise their professional skills, and it also encourages those who do not yet meet these standards to do so. It will help raise the standard of advice available to employers and increase their confidence in the advice they receive.”
Membership is voluntary and, to be eligible to join, individual consultants will need to be either chartered members of IOSH, CIEH or REHIS, or a fellow of the IIRSM. Membership requires a commitment to continuous professional development, a degree-equivalent qualification, two years’ experience, and professional indemnity insurance. Those on the register will be bound by a code of conduct to provide only “sensible and proportionate advice”.
The EEF was particularly pleased that Lord Young had resisted calls to introduce statutory licensing of advisors and consultants, arguing that this “would have imposed unnecessary costs on lower-risk businesses”.
Said the organisation’s head of health and safety, Steve Pointer: “The much tougher voluntary accreditation system is a victory for commons sense over vested interests.”
Asked what difference the new scheme would really make when practitioners can already demonstrate competence via, for example, chartered membership of IOSH and the CIEH, Pointer said: “Previously, if you wanted to find a health and safety consultant, there was no information on the HSE site to say CMIOSH was the thing to ask for, because the Executive wasn’t allowed to recognise membership of any one organisation. This wasn’t very helpful.
“Also, there hasn’t been until now any way to take action against those who give excessive, as opposed to insufficient or incorrect, advice. The new scheme addresses that.”
However, the British Occupational Hygiene Society (BOHS) gave the scheme a more cautious welcome, saying it doesn’t yet provide “a complete service sigposting employers towards those who are experienced and qualified beyond the scope of safety risk assessments”.
The BOHS is one of the stakeholder organisations involved in the scheme but at this stage, occupational hygienists and other specialist OSH consultants are not eligible to join. Said David O’Malley, registrar of the BOHS Faculty: “It is a concern that one of the main drivers behind the original impetus for the scheme – the issue of ‘consultant creep’, where consultants give wrong, or misleading advice on areas outside their expertise – will not be addressed, and that the credibility of the scheme risks being undermined until the scope of the specialist disciplines operating in this field has been recognised and incorporated.”
