EU Retained Law Bill
"Calm down, dear"
In case you’ve been away for a while, the Health & Safety Executive website published a sensational headline on 11th October 2022: “The UK has left the EU”. Cynicism aside, it’s been a troubling three years for the health & safety profession.
The Brexit referendum which led to the UK leaving the EU was, of course, the brain child of Prime Minister David Cameron in 2013 – the same prime minister who one year earlier had vowed to bring an end to the health and safety monster.
Various parliamentary committees over the years looked into the presumed red tape surrounding Britain’s health & safety culture.
They arrived at broadly similar conclusions that, since most of our modern H&S laws stem from Brussels, there was little we, as EU members, could do to opt-out from the majority of them.
Does Brexit now give HM Government the freedom it seeks to slay that monster once and for all, and return to the sunlit uplands of children returning to sweep chimneys, women working down mines, workplace disease, disfiguration, and death?
Err, no.
Arinite’s February 2019 Blog pointed out how, as the first country to industrialise, and introduce workplace H&S laws – backed up by enforcement -, the UK has long enjoyed one of Europe’s (if not the world’s) best workplace accident rates.
We even quoted the HSE’s Brexit approach to regulation being: “to preserve the UK’s high standards in health and safety”.
My own prediction four years ago was that we will need to demonstrate high H&S standards to be allowed to continue trading with the EU.
Nothing to see here
The HSE’s more recent pronouncement “The UK has left the EU” (above) goes on to elaborate….well, very little in fact.
Gone are the strong commitments to protecting the UK’s proud history of H&S leadership and bearing a torch for the rest of the world.
Instead, we are left with a limp lettuce: “Your responsibility to protect the health and safety of people affected by your work activities remain”.
Does this deafening silence mean the HSE might be worried that the Government is about to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and ditch thirty years of harmonised H&S regulations?
Indeed, Britain’s Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill 2022 lists over 2,400 pieces of retained EU law (not just H&S) to be reviewed and either kept, modified, or scrapped by 31st December 2023. This is an awful lot of legislation to sift through in the next nine months.
Personally, I think a cost-benefit analysis will be carried out, and EU laws that have served us well, and saved lives – such as work at heights regulations – will be kept or only lightly watered-down.
Laws that, if truth be told, commit employers to a deal of effort with only marginal benefits - and which weren’t admired sufficiently by non-EU countries to be worth copying - could be for the chop.
Display screen equipment workstation assessments, anyone? Could be living on borrowed time!
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