There are several issues in the United Kingdom at the moment that could affect workplace safety, not including Lord Young’s OHS review.
Great Britain is to undergo enormous funding cuts to most of the civil service. The Health & Safety Executive (HSE) is to have its budget cut by 35% according to the Trades Union Congress (TUC).
Another issue is that a TUC survey has found:
“Almost half (49%) of safety representatives said that as far as they know, a health and safety inspector has never inspected their workplace…”
The TUC says that the same survey indicates that the threat of inspection is a major motivator to OHS improvements. In a media release on 1 November 2010 TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said:
“Knowing that an inspector is likely to visit is one of the key drivers to changing employers’ behaviour and making the workplace safer and healthier. It is a scandal that nearly half of workplaces in the UK have never been visited by a health and safety inspector.”
And those inspectors are most likely to come from the HSE . Data from the HSE shows that the number of enforcement notices has hovered around 10,000 each year for the last decade. The number of prosecutions over that time have steadily declined.
What is really required is the number of the inspections undertaken by the HSE but this information is not included in the latest annual statistics.
If safety improvements are made in businesses due to the threat of an OHS inspection by a regulators, how does the HSE plan to keep the pressure on when it will lose over a third of its budget? Continue reading “Do budget cuts equal cuts in safety enforcement?”
