Five pieces of health and safety guidance have been combined to help employers more quickly understand how to protect their workers from dangerous substances and explosive atmospheres.
The HSE has consolidated five ACoPs under the Dangerous Substances and Explosive Atmospheres Regulations (DSEAR) covering issues from plant design and operation through to maintenance.
These regulations require the elimination or reduction of risk of fire and explosion from substances connected with work activities.
While L133 (unloading petrol from road tankers) remains a separate ACoP, this second edition of L138 incorporates the following ACoPs, which have now been withdrawn:
€ﾢ L134 Design of plant, equipment and workplaces;
€ﾢ L135 Storage of dangerous substances;
€ﾢ L136 Control and mitigation measures; and
€ﾢ L137 Safe maintenance, repair and cleaning procedures.
The ACoP is primarily for an informed and experience audience such as health and safety professionals. The leaflet ‘Controlling fire and explosion risks in the workplace INDG370’ provides a short guide to DSEAR for small and medium-sized businesses.
The ACoP applies to workplaces that manufacture, store, process or use dangerous substances as defined in this publication and is being introduced following public consultation and ministerial and HSE board approval.
The content has been updated in light of changes to European and domestic legislation, such as substance classification, labelling issues and general fire safety. No significant new duties are placed on businesses that are already in compliance with the replaced ACoPs and the regulations themselves are unchanged.
Director of HSE’s long latency health risks division, Karen Clayton, explained: “The text is now clearer and simpler overall and merging the five ACoPs eliminates repetition across the original documents. Navigation has been improved with an enhanced contents list to enable the dutyholder to find the advice that is of most interest to them.”
Legal responsibilities (the requirements of the DSEAR regulations) to protect workers’ safety are not altered by any redrafting to the ACoP.
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