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Freedom Of Information Request Regarding Abolished HS Legislation Made To The HSE Given the major changes being forced upon the health and safety community by this Tory-led Con-Dem(ned) coalition government; it is extremely difficult to keep track of the legislation, guidance, and ACOPS that are being withdrawn, re-written or made available on-line only.
The request asked for: “…… a detailed list of all H&S Legislation, ACOPS, Guidance which has been amended, or scrapped completely between April 2010 and 4th February 2012.” Commenting on his request, Chris told Unionsafety: “By the time the Tory policy of attacking health and safety workplace protection legislation and associated employment rights is completed, the UK will have been turned back to the early 18th Century when the rich landowners, business owners and the powerful and rich people were able to work, with impunity, their employees to death and keep 100% of the profits that their workers made for them.” He continued: “It is vitally important to know, every step of the way, the degree of damage being done by the Tory policy and aim to decimate health and safety culture completely.
He sites this as being the reason for his Freedom Of Information request to the HSE. However, even a die-hard cynic would be just as shocked as Chris was to receive the following response from the HSE to his request: “Your request is very broad and could cover an enormous amount of information and gathering it together would be likely to involve a significant cost and diversion of resource. It seems likely that it will exceed the £600 limit that the Government has set for dealing with Freedom of Information requests. I would like to ask you therefore to try to narrow down your request to focus more clearly on the exact information you want.” Whilst the HSE suggest scouring of their website for where changes can be found, there is no easy way of doing this and being able to come up with a comprehensive and accurate listing of amended or scrapped legislation, ACOPs, and guidance. Further to simply access the Government’s legislation listing website to attempt to find this information is, again completely impracticable and would mean reading every piece of H&S legislation under review. But examining the HSE’s response further, one paragraph stands out: “HSE has undertaken a review of guidance and in some cases has either withdrawn guidance; withdrawn and incorporated into website content; combined in revised guidance or handed over to industry.”
It is further shocking to learn that the HSE dont appear to be keeping track themselves of exactly what legislation, ACOPS and guidances are being amended, scrapped, amalgamated or passed on to industry to decide what to do with it. If they have been, then why not make this information public? Further, it would not mean lengthy and expensive use of resources to gather this information if it already existed and was being kept by the HSE, which leads Chris Ingram to believe that this is either a deliberate ploy not to provide the information or that they are admitting they are not keeping track of what they are doing! It would of course be more helpful to the Tory aims to leave a system of confused health and safety legislation changes and abolitions in order to make any reversals of policy by a future government an extremely daunting exercise to say the least. Chris Ingram’s response to the HSE suggestions for further reducing the scope of his request was to simply to say: “Dear Health and Safety Executive, Further developements on Chris’s Freedom Of Information request from the HSE will be advised once received. Under the legislation, the HSE has until 12th April to provide the requested information or good reasons for refusing to do so. Source: Unionsafety / Chris Ingram / HSE / What Do They Know website |
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In trying to gather detailed information from the HSE in order to get a complete picture of the damage done so far, Unionsafety web-editor, Chris Ingram, sent a Freedom Of Information request to the HSE in February.
We need ongoing intelligence in what is crudely a war against the working people of this country; in order to be effective in our defence and aims of re-instating an even more robust health and safety protection at work system than the Tories are destroying.”
In other words it appears that the HSE in some areas of health and safety guidance and/or legislation has simply withdrawn any responsibility for the implementation, enforcement and support of health and safety legislation to the employer!