‘Revitalising Health and Safety at Work'
An Evaluation of the Government’s/HSC’s Response to Consultation
Overview
In general the Government appear to have responded positively to the key points which have emerged from the consultation exercise. There are ten key themes and 44 Action Points in the whole package (see annex three). These are intended as a framework for re-energising health and safety, concentrating particularly on the health and safety needs of workers in small and medium size enterprises. The package focuses strongly on the ‘three pillars’ for delivering sustained improvement in health and safety performance: 1) competent and committed leadership from board level; 2) effective integration of health and safety into all management processes; and 3) strong workforce involvement. There is a clear Government commitment to making board level directors more directly accountable for health and safety performance and to working towards setting a health and safety management ‘yardstick’ or standard. (There is specific reference at para 45 of the document to RoSPA’s ‘key issue’ DASH (‘Director Action on Safety and Health’) project, and in particular to the current RoSPA consultation exercise on measuring and accounting for corporate health and safety performance.)
Other significant features of the Government’s plans include: the general commitment to tougher enforcement by inspectors; the idea of introducing novel penalties such as compulsory retraining and remedial programmes; the commitment to make occupational health a central feature of future health and safety and public health strategies; plans to embed safety and risk concepts in education at all levels; making the achievement of high health safety standards a requirement of all public bodies as well as part of Government procurement processes; and developing ‘joined up’ approaches with other departments and agencies, including, for example with the Small Firms’ Service so that health and safety becomes an integral part of the development of every new business.
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