Affordable Health and Safety

In the UK, the legislation relating to Health and Safety runs to thousands of pages, and the majority of businesses are not even aware of most of it. So how do you deal with the issue of “Ignorance is no defence”.

Most Health and Safety is about common sense, legislation is put in place to ensure that everyone is applying that common sense in the same way. Approaching Health and Safety from the viewpoint of removing risk, making workplaces safer and creating a positive safety culture is basically what is attempting to be achieved by the many thousands of legislation’s now on the statute books.

So sifting through what is applicable to you and you business can be a very time consuming and costly exercise. Some just put their hands up and say “call in the professionals”, some spend hours surfing the internet for information, and some just do nothing at all.

Is it right that we are expected to know what we should do, but no one tells us where to go to get an easy answer. Well we at The Health and Safety Companion don’t think that Health and Safety should be costly, or time consuming, or difficult to find your answers. That’s why we have developed an intelligent Health and Safety system which identifies what is applicable to your business, advises you in simple language what you need to do, provides you with all of the appropriate documentation, and even reminds you when it needs to be done. All for less than £1 per day.

This system can be used anywhere on any computer, providing that you have an internet connection. It is securely protected to ensure that your privacy is retained and it is updated on a daily basis, thereby ensuring that you cannot get caught out by any new pieces of legislation.

If you would like a free 14 day trial please go to www.healthandsafetycompanion.com/signup and enter the letter T in the referral code box.

You won’t realise how easy it is to be Health and Safety compliant until you try it.

The HSE plans to charge businesses for breaches of Health and Safety

On the 22nd July 2011 a three month consultation exercise was launched by the HSE detailing its plans to charge businesses (duty-holders) for giving advice and serving enforcement notices to remedy health and safety failings that do not warrant prosecution.

"We accept Credit Cards as well you know!!!"

Government has agreed the principle and cost recovery will definitely go ahead however some of the finer points may be open to negotiation.
The cost recovery scheme will mean that inspectors will charge businesses whenever they find a “material breach” of the law and this is expected to generate revenue for the executive of more than £43 million a year.
The consultation document also notes that charging will not be discretionary and that inspectors will be obliged to bill for work to remedy material breaches once charging starts.
The proposed regime will cover all businesses regulated by the HSE, excluding those in sectors such as chemicals and mining, where separate charging regimes are already in place.
Under the three year exemption for micro and start up businesses all new legislation adopted after April 2011 will not be enforced for this group, however the HSE has requested that Government do not include the cost recovery scheme in this exemption.
How will it work?
The HSE proposes that if an inspector finds a material breach they would retrospectively charge from the start of the visit and then for time spent giving verbal advice, confirmation letters detailing the failing or Prohibition or Improvement Notices, plus follow-up visits or phone calls to ensure the duty-holder has remedied the fault.
The Health and Safety Executive estimates these activities will typically total £750 for a breach that necessitates sending a letter and £1500 for serving a notice. This is based on a provisional hourly rate of £133 which has been calculated to cover the inspectors’ time and that of support staff along with office and facilities costs. If field officers need specialist help to analyse a breach or to advise a dutyholder, charges will be considerably higher than the £133 hourly rate.
Neal Stone, head of policy at the British Safety Council, says that assuming an average of 10 hours per intervention, he estimates the HSE will have to uncover more than 30,000 breaches a year to meet its recovery estimate.
Funny that this come at a time when there has been an announcement that the HSE’s budget is to be cut by 35%!
The HSE’s Regulatory Impact Assessment for the scheme estimates that its inspectors will spend approximately 54,000 days a year on inspection, investigation and enforcement excluding work on prosecutions and that some two-thirds of those days will uncover material breaches, yielding recovery income of around £43.4 million a year.
Dutyholders who believe they have been unfairly charged or that the charges were not properly explained to them will be able to dispute the bill.
But the HSE proposes that disputes are handled internally, first by a principal inspector and then by a senior manager. Where the judgment goes against the duty-holder, the executive plans to charge the duty-holder for the extra time spent on the dispute.
Currently the HSE’s preferred scheme does not include local authority enforcement; but the consultation asks for the views of local councils on whether they should pursue charging.