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The number of Improvement and Prohibition Notices issued to Scottish organisations in the first half of this year is on course to increase by around 38 per cent compared with the corresponding period last year.
 
The projection is made by law firm Pinsent Masons, as part of an analysis of enforcement actions across regions of the UK.
 
The law firm looked at HSE figures on the number of enforcement notices issued up until May this year. Its research shows there were 473 notices issued in Scotland up until May, compared with 411 over the same period last year. Pinsent Masons projected there would be 568 enforcement notices issued up to the end of June – amounting to a 38-per-cent rise in enforcement notices compared with the first six months of 2011.
 
This pattern is not reflected in other regions around the UK – in London, for example, enforcement actions appear to have dropped significantly (from 739 to 393 in the first half of 2012).
 
The trend in Scotland is likely to be of particular concern for the region’s manufacturing and construction businesses, which accounted for 50 per cent and 42 per cent, respectively, of all enforcement actions taken throughout the UK in the first half of this year.
 
Laura Cameron, a partner and regulatory specialist at Pinsent Masons, warned businesses to be on their guard, particularly as the introduction of the HSE’s cost-recovery scheme is just weeks away.

“This is likely to concentrate the minds of many compliance officers, as the HSE prepares to introduce its new charging regime – known as Fee for Intervention – in the autumn,” she said.
 
Under the FFI scheme, which is due to come into force on 1 October, the HSE will be able to recover the costs of investigations and enforcement measures where an offence has occurred.
 
Cameron explained: “The key components of FFI are that hourly charges of up to £256 could apply where, in the inspector’s opinion, there is a material breach of law requiring a formal regulatory intervention. The new regime will come into force in October and, while it is not intended to be revenue-generating for HSE, in recent years they have occasionally accrued a modest surplus in other sectors that operate similar charging regimes.”

The HSE warned against reading too much into the figures and stressed that it operates “a consistent Britain-wide enforcement approach”.

Its director of field operations, David Ashton, said: “Comparing enforcement year on year is misleading, as is making a direct comparison with other parts of Britain. While we have broad regulatory priorities that are pertinent to the whole of Britain, there are also initiatives relevant to some areas that can lead to different activity patterns at different times – such as the refurbishment initiative in the construction sector we ran in the early part of this year.

“The key point here is that enforcement notices are issued in response to serious health and safety shortcomings. The real issue of concern should be the poor standards that have led to the notices being served in the first place.”