Risk news

The Government has promised to make "complex" health and safety regulations "easier to understand" for the sake of overly-burdened small businesses.

The commitment from Secretary of State for Business, John Hutton, followed a new report from the Better Regulation Executive - part of the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform - which examined how health and safety regulation affected low risk and small businesses.

The report - which can be viewed/downloaded here - sets out a series of recommendations to "save firms time and money, while improving working environments and general understanding of health and safety."

Mr Hutton commented: "The UK has one of the best workplace safety records in the world, with fatalities and injuries falling by more than 70% over the last three decades. But the public and business community's perception of health and safety regulation is poor.

"Introducing simple steps, such as making information more easily available and getting better advice to firms that need it, will help save time and money for UK business. Cutting the amount of paperwork for low risk businesses, and making complex regulations easier to understand, will also help create safer environments for workers and the public."

Recommendations made
The Better Regulation Executive report's recommendations included:

• Improved web-based and telephone support, offering advice as well as information, for low risk businesses
  
• Better advice to help small businesses know when to buy-in the help of consultants for health and safety advice
  
• Maximising the resources of HSE and local authority inspectors, making inspection and enforcement more efficient, focusing on higher risk workplaces meaning fewer inspections for low risk
  
• Developing a new, single assurance scheme so small businesses can have just one process to deal with a range of requirements, including health and safety, fire and food safety regulations
  
• Improving the perception and understanding of health and safety issues.
  

The report went on to claim that the average company spent around 20 hours each year, or more than ¿350, on administration meeting health and safety requirements. Cutting this time by just five hours per company would save low risk businesses ¿150 million a year, it said.

Burden or ignorance?
Trade union leaders slammed the report, claiming the Government was getting its priorities wrong on the issue.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: "This report does nothing to address the appalling health and safety record of Britain's small businesses. Instead it looks to what it terms the 'burden' of health and safety regulation for businesses.

"Small businesses have a worse record on most health issues than larger ones. Rather than address this problem, many have simply ignored it. More than half of small businesses have not even done a basic risk assessment, despite this being a legal requirement."

He added: "The aim of health and safety regulation is to protect workers from injury and ill-health. Obeying the law is not a 'burden' but a legal duty and if an employer - whatever their size - is putting the lives or health of their workers at risk, they should be prosecuted like any other criminal."