Health and Safety - Risk Verses Hazard ?

Chris Grayling, the Employment Minister has today announced a number of measures aimed at cutting the bureaucracy of health and safety.  Announcing the changes Grayling suggested that the plans "shift the focus of health and safety activity away from businesses that do the right thing, and instead concentrate efforts on higher risk areas and on dealing with serious breaches of health and safety regulation".

The measures include a register for Health and Safety Consultants to ensure that advice given in this field is better regulated and also a reduction in the number of health and safety inspections carried out in workplaces with the remaining inspections focused upon the "high risk" workplaces.

Press reports can be found <here (Yahoo)> and <here (CIPD)>. 

The roots of these changes date back to the Lord Young report entitled Common Sense - Common Safety which was published last autumn.

Whilst I am a great fan of simplifying systems to make them more helpful to industry and cutting red tape I do have some concerns over these measures and, more specifically, their interpretation.  The key question that I have is the definition of "high risk" workplaces.  Having worked for many years in the chemical industry I am well aware that this industry deals with some fairly significant "hazards" but through tightly controlling their operations the "risk" posed to employees and the public is kept at a very low level.....however the public perception of the industry is still that it is a "high risk" industry. 

A simple search through the Health and Safety Executive's press releases shows that the vast majority of businesses that are taken to court over breaches of health and safety law or as a result of injuries or fatalities to employees are not the "high hazard" industries but normal business such as garages, engineering firms, building sites, haulage depots and the like.  The most common themes would (not unsurprisingly) appear to be working at heights, working with moving vehicles and working with unguarded machinery, issues that are present in the vast majority of UK businesses and all of which have been on the HSE's hit-list over the last few years.

So, coming back to Grayling's quote to "shift the focus of health and safety activity away from businesses that do the right thing, and instead concentrate efforts on higher risk areas and on dealing with serious breaches of health and safety regulation" I can see a major Catch 22 situation.....without inspections being carried out by the HSE, how do you know which business to target?  I hope that the answer will be a practical one and not a political one.