Health and Safety Legal Registers: 7 Changes Since 2025 You May Have Missed
A legal register is only useful while it is current, and currency is the part nobody owns. The register gets built properly, usually by someone competent, and then it sits. Twelve months later it describes a legal landscape that has moved underneath it, and nobody notices until an auditor asks why a policy cites an instrument that was repealed.
For organisations operating in one country that risk is manageable. For anyone running several, it compounds, because changes arrive in different jurisdictions on different timetables and none of them sends a notification. The period since the start of 2025 has been unusually busy, and two of the changes below repealed entire bodies of law rather than amending them.
Seven items, roughly in date order. The last is structural rather than a single event, and it is the one that will cause the most trouble over the next few years.
1. Sweden replaced its entire rulebook, January 2025
The most complete change on this list. From 1 January 2025 the Swedish work environment regulations were restructured: approximately sixty-seven separate instruments consolidated into fifteen, with every one of roughly 2,300 paragraphs reviewed and re-sorted, and all regulations and sections renumbered.
The systematic work environment management rules previously cited as AFS 2001:1 are now AFS 2023:1. The organisational and social work environment rules, AFS 2015:4, no longer exist as a standalone instrument and sit within AFS 2023:2, together with several others including lone working and violence and threats. Requirement levels were broadly preserved, but references and section numbers were not, so a citation to a specific paragraph is now wrong rather than merely dated. The authority publishes the current structure in English.
Check: every Swedish document, template and training pack for AFS references.
2. Robot safety standards revised, February 2025
ISO 10218 was revised in February 2025, its first substantial revision since 2011. Most of the separate technical specification on collaborative robot applications was absorbed into the standard itself, and the treatment changed in a way that matters: collaborative operation is now framed as a property of the application rather than of the robot.
This affects any organisation with robotics in a laboratory, test facility or production environment, which now includes a growing number of technology companies that were pure software businesses three years ago.
Check: whether cell-level risk assessments reference the superseded structure.
3. Japan moved to extend mandatory stress checks, May 2025
Need Expert H&S Guidance?
Our qualified consultants can help you implement the right health & safety measures for your business.
A revision to Japan's Industrial Safety and Health Act promulgated in May 2025 removes the fifty-worker floor for the mandatory stress check programme, extending it to workplaces of all sizes. Enforcement is set by Cabinet Order within three years of promulgation, placing the outer date around May 2028, and implementation guidance for smaller workplaces has already been published. JISHA publishes English-language material on Japanese practice.
Check: whether any Japanese site currently below fifty workers is treating the stress check as optional. It has a defined shelf life.
4. India repealed twenty-nine Acts, November 2025
On 21 November 2025 India brought all four Labour Codes into force. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 alone replaced thirteen central Acts, and twenty-nine were repealed across the four Codes together.
The important nuance is that in force does not yet mean fully enforceable. Labour sits on the Concurrent List, central rules have been in draft and state rules are landing at different speeds, so operational detail continues to settle and varies between states. The official position is published by the Ministry of Labour and Employment.
Check: any Indian policy or register entry naming the Factories Act, the Contract Labour Act or other repealed legislation.
5. EU sustainability reporting narrowed, February 2026
The Omnibus directive published in the Official Journal in February 2026 substantially reduced the population of entities required to report under the corporate sustainability framework, following an earlier deferral of later reporting waves and a simplification exercise that cut mandatory datapoints by roughly sixty per cent. Member state transposition runs into 2027, and simplified standards are expected to apply to financial years beginning in 2027.
Health and safety is affected because workforce disclosures include safety metrics. Many organisations that were building data collection are now outside the perimeter, and many that are outside will still be asked for the same data by in-scope clients and investors. Confirm the current position with the European Commission, because this file has moved repeatedly.
Check: whether your reporting assumption still matches your actual obligation, in either direction.
6. EU machinery rules change, January 2027
Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 replaces the existing machinery regime and applies from 20 January 2027, with no transitional period during which both frameworks operate. Its scope deliberately extends to autonomous mobile machinery, connected equipment and systems where artificial intelligence performs safety functions. EU-OSHA summarises the regulation.
This one is on the horizon rather than behind you, which makes it the easiest to plan for and the easiest to forget.
Check: whether anything you place on the EU market, or substantially modify for your own use, falls in scope.
7. Great Britain and the EU are diverging, continuously
The structural item, and the one that will generate the most register maintenance over the next decade.
For a long time a single European line in a legal register was a reasonable approximation, because Great Britain and the EU moved together. That is no longer safe. The machinery position above is the clearest current example: the EU regime changes in January 2027 while Great Britain retains its own framework and its own marking, so a group operating on both sides now tracks two divergent sets of requirements rather than one with local variations.
Divergence is not a single event to be logged. It is a permanent increase in the maintenance burden, and registers built on the assumption of alignment will degrade quietly rather than fail visibly. Our overview of health and safety legislation covers the underlying frameworks.
Check: whether your register treats Great Britain and the EU as one entry or two.
The seven at a glance
| When | What changed | Who it affects |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 2025 | Swedish rulebook restructured, all references renumbered | Any Swedish entity |
| Feb 2025 | Robot safety standards revised | Robotics, test facilities, hardware teams |
| May 2025 | Japan to extend stress checks to all workplace sizes | Japanese sites, especially small ones |
| Nov 2025 | India repealed 29 Acts, four Codes in force | Any Indian entity |
| Feb 2026 | EU sustainability reporting scope narrowed | Reporters and their suppliers |
| Jan 2027 | EU machinery regime replaced | Machinery placed on or modified for the EU market |
| Ongoing | Great Britain and EU divergence | Any group operating both sides |
Four of the seven affect documents rather than physical arrangements, which is worth noting because document problems are cheap to fix and expensive to be caught by. A policy citing repealed legislation costs an afternoon to correct and looks like negligence in a due diligence response.
Keeping a register current without a standing team
Three things make the difference, and none requires headcount.
An owner per jurisdiction. Not a central owner for everything. Somebody who would plausibly hear about a change in that country, which in practice means the locally qualified practitioner rather than a group function reading English-language summaries.
A review cadence with a date. Annual is adequate for most jurisdictions and inadequate for any undergoing reform. India and Sweden both warrant shorter cycles at present.
A register that records the citation, not just the topic. An entry reading "risk assessment obligations" survives any amount of legislative change and tells you nothing. An entry naming the instrument and the section is the thing that breaks visibly when the law moves, which is exactly what you want it to do.
Holding this across many countries is where health and safety consultants and software are worth considerably more together than either is alone: the register is the system, the currency comes from people who work in those jurisdictions. Periodic health and safety audits then test whether the register still matches the law rather than whether it exists.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite works with locally qualified practitioners in each country, which is the only reliable way a group learns that a national rulebook has been renumbered or a body of law repealed. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants maintain the arrangements underneath the register, and our global health and safety consultants keep the jurisdictional picture current rather than annual.
If your register has not been reviewed since 2024, at least two entries above are almost certainly wrong. Our international health and safety consultants can tell you which. A free gap analysis will identify what needs correcting before an auditor or a client questionnaire does.
Related Articles
Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
