The tough new health and safety legislation is welcome but Bob Towse, head of technical and safety at the HVCA, sees major flaws in the way it is being enforced.
This year has started with a whole new health and safety regime in place. The Health and Safety Offences Act 2008 came into force in January adding a range of higher penalties for employers who put their workforce at risk.

However, there is growing unease about how this will be policed and enforced as the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) seems to have cut its allocation of resources to this important task.

The act, which amends and updates Section 33 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, raises the maximum penalties that can be imposed in the lower courts for most health and safety offences from £5,000 to £20,000. It also makes imprisonment an option for a wider range of offences, according to Lord McKenzie, minister at the Department for Work and Pensions.

The changes will ensure sentences can be set at a level that will deal with businesses that do not take their health and safety management responsibilities seriously, and will further encourage employers and others to comply with the law, the minister stated recently.

'The act sends an important message to those who flout the law,' said Judith Hackitt, chair of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), adding that good employers and good managers had nothing to fear from it.

'I want to remind businesses that there are no changes to their existing legal duties, and safeguards are in place to ensure that the new powers will be used sensibly and proportionately,' Hackitt insisted.

Step forward

However, higher fines by themselves will not improve the situation if there is nobody enforcing them or if they are aimed in the wrong place. The act is clearly a step forward for health and safety legislation, but it is essential that we see better resourced and more considered enforcement to support them.

According to HVCA members, there used to be many more unannounced visits to construction sites by HSE officials than there are today. It is not enough for the HSE to simply swoop in and slap the wrists of businesses following an incident, regardless of whose fault it was.

Our industry has made enormous progress in recent years with health and safety training - to the point where there is only so much more you can do technically to make things better. Now the main task is to establish a culture of health and safety where all site-based operatives think in a safe and responsible way and do not assume that someone else is going to take responsibility for their safety and that of their colleagues working around them.

We cannot keep going back to the employers and putting more financial pressure on businesses - especially in the current economic climate - with fines that do not address the problem at grassroots level. There are a number of cases where the HSE should consider taking action against individual site operatives to ram the message home.

Taking responsibility

Employers do, ultimately, carry the burden for ensuring safe working conditions for their staff. However, there is a worrying trend in this country to abdicate from taking responsibility for your own actions that has been encouraged by an ever more pervasive litigation culture.

Company managers must continue to do their bit but everyone has a role to play in this and slapping the boss's wrist isn't always the answer.

www.hvca.org.uk