Tory Publish Policy Attack On Health & Safety

Business to self-regulate health and safety - Dismiss HSE inspections

A new policy document published by the tories spells out the foundation for a free for all business culture where regulators have little power and business determine their own health and safety standards and regulate their own health and safety cultures.

Using the term 'Red Tape' to describe all government regulation, including health and safety law, the tory plan would see massive costs involved in business ensuring they meet minimum standards and the creation of businesses calling themselves 'health and safety experts'.

Following the Australian recent abolition of many health and safety regulations and laws, the Tories plan to follow that and the American model of self regulation.

The document entitled "Regulation In The Post-Bureaucratic Age" makes it clear that it sees the HSE as merely a Government quango.

On page 4 of the document they clearly attack health and safety:

"The powers of Government inspectors will be drastically curbed by allowing firms to arrange their own, externally audited inspections and, providing they pass, to refuse entry to official inspectors thereafter. We will also introduce ‘MOT style’ inspection reports, quoting precisely which section of which law has been broken, to prevent regulatory ‘scope creep’ where laws are applied too strictly by overzealous inspectors."

and employment rights:

"We will consult carefully on changes that may be required to the employment and discrimination tribunals system, to ensure the system offers fast, cheap and accessible justice, and that it is fair to all sides."

If elected a Conservative government would allow business and the public to nominate their most hated regulations and as such they will then be repealed within a 12 month period if found to be costly to business!

The document explains:

"A Conservative Government will create a process for reviewing and, if necessary, modernising the 30 worst failures in regulations and red tape each year. Once a regulation has been officially entered for this process, it will automatically acquire a ‘sunset clause’ which will repeal it entirely 12 months later, unless the Government or Parliament takes positive action to reaffirm or modernise it in the meantime.

The regulations to be re-examined would be selected in the following way:

The ten ‘most hated’ regulations nominated by the public on the BIS better regulation website. We will create a voting system to allow the most resented regulations to be nominated and quantified, subject only to the conditions that they must impose a net regulatory burden (i.e. the benefits on the Impact Assessment must be less than the costs, so the process is not hijacked by pressure groups whose agenda has nothing to do with better regulation), that they must be more than five years old (so they don’t duplicate the automatic post implementation review process above) and that they must not have been reviewed within the past five years either.

The ten ‘most hated’ laws or regulations nominated by representative business and consumer bodies such as Consumer Focus, Which, the British Chambers of Commerce, the Federation of Small Businesses, the Confederation of British Industry or the Institute of Directors. These nominations would be subject to the same conditions as the public nominations described above."

Given that the FSB and the CBI see all health and safety legislation as burdensome, quite clearly the death toll from accidents at work and the tens of thousands of injuries sustained by workers each year will be allowed to spiral.

TUC Risks this week covered this news item explaining:

A Conservative government would allow firms to opt-out from Health and Safety Executive (HSE) inspections, with qualifying firms allowed to bar the watchdog from their premises. Instead the Conservative Party is recommending an audit system modeled on the financial sector controls that gave us Enron, Madoff and that nearly brought the entire banking system to its knees.

The Tory policy document, "Regulation in the post-bureaucratic age", trailed by shadow business secretary Ken Clarke at the party's conference, says "the powers of government inspectors will be drastically curbed" with firms allowed to arrange "their own, externally audited inspections instead." Its aim of "taming regulators" would include "replacing regulator-run public teams of inspectors with a model closer to financial controls and audits."

The policy paper adds: "Well run companies would employ professionally qualified experts in, for example health and safety or food safety, in the same way as they use accountants for a financial function to ensure that the correct internal processes are in place, and that reported results are reliable. And organisation which has undertaken a co-regulation review and has published an independently audited statement that it satisfies the required regulatory outcomes, would be allowed to refuse entry to official inspectors in anything other than an emergency."

A similar system in the US, on which the Tory proposals appear to be based, has been criticised for being ineffective and having high administration costs. In June, concerns that audits were fixed and oversight was minimal led the US safety watchdog OSHA to launch an investigation "to address problems identified in its Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP)". Acting head of OSHA, Jordan Barab, commented:"Our evaluation of these programs in the context of OSHA's limited resources will help ensure that OSHA will be able to reprioritise these resources in the most effective manner."

The Unions have been quick to respond with the HSE worker's union Prospect saying: " health and safety inspections and firm law enforcement are the hallmarks of a civilised society and have contributed to the UK having one of the best workplace health and safety records in the world."

Sarah Page, the union's national safety officer, said: "Is Ken Clarke seriously saying that employers in these industries should regulate their own health and safety arrangements and close the door to our protectors?"

She added: "Clarke's proposals are a recipe for avoidable deaths and injuries at work and catastrophic events such as Buncefield."

Alan Ritchie, general secretary of construction union UCATT, said: "These latest Conservative proposals are very disturbing. It would prove disastrous in an industry like construction."

Unite said it was concerned externally audited inspections would not be backed up by proper "enforcement powers."

The union's national officer for construction, Bob Blackman, said: "The Tories should be focusing on preventing accidents and deaths rather than looking at ways of saving money for the employers. The HSE is not perfect, but at least it is trusted by the workforce and carries 'enforcement powers'."

He said the policy "goes to show the Tories' true colours," adding: "They are the party of the bosses and by cutting 'red tape' for employers they will be putting the lives and health of workers at risk."

Unionsafety has highlighted the Tory attitude toward health and safety on numerous occasions and also the fact that the issue needs to be promoted as an election issue and not just be seen as part of the Trade Union's attempts at ensuring workers terms and conditions as it is currently by the media and most of the public.

On employment tribunals, the document states that Tory aims are:

Ensuring regulations are intuitive for anyone who is reasonably well-informed on a particular matter, and that they expect reasonable personal responsibility too. This principle is particularly important because many organisations currently feel at a disadvantage, principally in the employment and discrimination tribunals system, from increasing numbers of cases which are brought in the hope of forcing them to settle out of court, regardless of the merits of the case.

This view is shared by many professional lawyers operating in the area, and is compounded by a conviction that tribunal decisions on similar cases are unacceptably inconsistent too. The problem is particularly troubling because the original (entirely admirable) motivation for creating the tribunals was to provide a fast, cheap and accessible forum for fair redress, which these criticisms throw into question.

A Conservative government will consult carefully on both the need for, and the nature of, any potential changes that may be required to the employment and discrimination tribunals system to ensure these fundamental principles are being properly applied, to ensure the system offers fast, cheap and accessible justice, and that it is fair to all sides. At the same time we will evaluate the progress which has already been made towards implementing the Macrory Principles of regulatory justice, which aim to improve both the flexibility, consistency and appropriateness of regulatory sanctions, to discover whether it is possible and desirable to speed the process up in future.

Download the document from the E-Library Database

Source: Risks / Conservative website / Unite / Prospect / CWU

 

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