Addressing fellow MPs in the Commons earlier this week, Chris Grayling began by saying “Britain has the best record in Europe for the prevention of death and serious injury in the workplace”, but one of the worst records for health and safety “red-tape”.
The Work and Pensions Minister then went on to talk about health and safety regulation in the UK and the recommendations of the recent Löfstedt review.
His colleague, the Conservative MP for Bournemouth East, Tobias Ellwood, referred to bizarre decision-making.
“I hope we’re going to see some change from this Government now,” he said.
In response, Mr Grayling claimed he wanted to see a simpler regulatory structure, saying health and safety decisions should be challenged if they are “daft”, as they probably had no basis in law.
Andrew Miller, Labour MP for Ellesmere Port and Neston, who was a member of the Löfstedt review panel, then looked for confirmation of his description of the report as “consolidating lots of statutory instruments”, explaining:
“It doesn’t actually remove the amount of safety regulation in those fields and more importantly, it’s not a short, quick fix, it’s a very long term systematic study that’s needed to achieve that.”
Mr Grayling answered the Government had begun a consultation on scrapping the first seven regulations. However, he explained, the review was not about “undermining” health and safety, but about creating a “streamlined and simple system” that business could easily understand.
Head of policy and public affairs at IOSH, Richard Jones, welcomed the discussion.
“Yesterday’s questions and answers were encouraging,” he said, “and proved that language is very important. It’s about merging similar regulations and dropping redundant ones – not removing important duties.
“The key point,” he added, “is that good health and safety is good for businesses, good for the economy and also good for growth.”
