IOSH 10 – Think tank targets health and safety profession

A centre-right think tank has slammed the health and safety culture and profession in Great Britain in a report that IOSH – on the eve of its annual conference in Glasgow – has strongly criticised as misguided and shallow.

Policy Exchange’s ‘Health and safety: reducing the burden’, published yesterday (23 March), warns of a “culture of over-compliance”, and of a “rapidly burgeoning health and safety industry, in which consultants have a clear incentive to inflate the level of risk mitigation that must be carried out, both to generate business and protect their reputation”.

It is particularly scathing about “specialist” health and safety firms and consultants, pointing out that they do not need qualifications and can gain an “industry-approved health and safety certificate after just a 10-day course”.

It also argues against reasonable practicability, saying greater clarity is required in the form of HSE guidance on when a risk assessment needs to be made, or how extensive it needs to be.

Directors’ duties are also a no-no, with the report suggesting that the “extensive legal liabilities [that] already exist for individual directors” should prompt the HSE to think again as to whether it should add further duties.

Stripping back legislation that applies to the self-employed should be investigated, as it is “questionable” whether such workers “need any health and safety requirements at all, except for ensuring that their work does not harm others”.

The report’s author, Corin Taylor, a senior policy advisor at the Institute of Directors, said: “Health and safety regulation has a long history and a noble purpose. Britain has gone from a country where children climbed chimneys to sweep away coal dust to virtually the safest place to work in the EU.

“But something has clearly gone wrong. There’s such an enormous amount of uncertainty about health and safety legislation, that this has led to a culture of over-compliance. Matters are little helped by the fact that there are no qualifications required to become a health and safety consultant, and it’s possible to acquire an industry-respected health and safety certificate after just 10 days.”

IOSH reacted angrily to the report, with chief executive Rob Strange fuming: “Once again, commentators have failed to fully investigate or understand the key issues surrounding health and safety, choosing instead an easy target – in this case, health and safety consultants and, by implication, all health and safety professionals.”

He went on: “There is a serious issue to be tackled here, and it needs to be confronted by society as a whole, including the health and safety, legal and insurance professions, educators and local government. None of these issues is original to Policy Exchange – for some time now, IOSH has been working hard to make progress on all these fronts, repeatedly calling on others, including politicians, to join in the challenge.”

In response to the report’s recommendations on reducing the “burden” of health and safety, IOSH pointed out that Policy Exchange had fundamentally misunderstood several key issues, including directors’ duties and the “difficulty” of risk assessments for small businesses, which ignores the considerable work carried out by the HSE to clarify and demystify this area.

On the subject of the profession, IOSH criticised the fact that the report makes no distinction between the wider IOSH membership of 38,000 and the 3000, or so members who are health and safety consultants. The Institution said that, contrary to the report, it hasn’t noticed any significant increase in the number of consultants in the last ten years. It also emphasised that all its members are assessed by the same criteria – on qualifications, experience and CPD – and that it has long argued that anyone practising as a consultant should be a chartered safety and health practitioner, or chartered member of IOSH.

NEBOSH, while acknowledging the report’s “deep flaws” in terms of its demands to strip back regulations, nevertheless welcomed its call for qualified health and safety consultants. The examining board’s chief executive, Teresa Budworth, said: “Often, it’s excessive health and safety measures put forward by those who are unqualified that fuel myths about health and safety.”

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber described the report as being “as relevant to the needs of the modern workplace as Alice in Wonderland”. He continued: “Anyone who believes that there is a culture of over-compliance needs some basic lesson in the reality of working life. Last year, 30 million days were lost due to injuries and ill health caused by work. And a quarter of a million people were injured at work. These were caused by employers failing to comply with health and safety regulations.”

Lowering standards or reducing regulation are not options, argued Barber, adding: “Instead, we need more support for those businesses that want to do the right thing, and more enforcement action against those that do not.”

Pressure group FACK (Families Against Corporate Killers) was apoplectic. In a statement, the group said: “Before the person we loved was killed in a workplace incident we might have believed the fairy story that the Policy Exchange seems to have swallowed hook, line and sinker: that there is a strict regime of health and safety, most employers are compliant, the HSE and local authorities rigorously enforce the law and punish those who fail to comply. Oh, how naïve we were – but we are now wiser through bitter experiences.”

Far from being overburdened by complying with regulations, the Group pointed out, “many employers are content to ignore warnings and risk assessments – if they bother to do them – fail to train, equip and monitor workers carrying out life-threatening work, and save the odd £12 here and there by rejecting safety equipment that would have prevented death”.

The report was issued just before Lord David Young’s opening address to the IOSH 10 conference this morning (Wednesday), in which the former minister for health and safety – now working with the Conservatives to determine future health and safety regulation and guidance should they win power at the next election – appeared to back the report’s findings (see our story ‘Health and safety in “crisis” says Lord Young’).

To download the Policy Exchange report, click here.