Legal environment: health and safety in the workplace

Often students are looking around to see how firms are affected by the legal environment that they operate in. All UK firms, big and small, are influenced by health and safety regulations, which might be starting to change.

Health and safety can get a bad press. That’s largely because we’ve generally forgotten how dangerous the workplace used to be . One under-reported piece of Olympics good news was that the entire Olympic site was constructed without a single fatality, which is an astonishing accomplishment.

But many firms complain about the burdens they face in meeting health and safety requirements. According to the Telegraph , more than 3,000 regulations will be scrapped or overhauled, so that shops, offices, pubs and clubs will no longer face "burdensome" health and safety inspections.

Legislation will be introduced which ministers say will protect business from "compensation culture" claims. From April 2013, the Government intends to introduce binding new rules on both the Health & Safety Executive and local authorities that will exempt hundreds of thousands of businesses from regular inspections.

Firms will only face health and safety inspections if they are operating in higher-risk areas such as construction or if they have an incident or track record of poor performance.The Government also said it will introduce legislation next month to ensure that businesses will only be held liable for civil damages in health and safety cases if they can be shown to have acted negligently.

According to Business Secretary Vince Cable, "in these tough times, businesses need to focus all their energies on creating jobs and growth, not being tied up in unnecessary red tape”. He has other long term plans for the UK economy that you can read about in the article.

The BBC also cover this story and quote the head of regulatory policy at the Institute of Directors who says, "excessive regulation costs time and money, both of which businesses would rather spend on developing new products, hiring staff and building up British business both here and abroad”.

But not everybody thinks it’s a good move, and some trade unions have voiced opposition, saying that the safety of employees and customers was being put at risk. The leader of the Rail Maritime and Transport (RMT) union called it an "all-out attack on safety" which he said will have "lethal consequences for workers and the public alike as businesses are given the green light to cut corners. Vince Cable's set of plans will drag the clock back and goes hand in hand with massive cuts to the enforcement arm of the health and safety executive". That seems to be a good example of a way in which different business stakeholders can come into conflict.