The risk-based OSH regulatory system introduced by the Robens report, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, has influenced other countries to revamp their legislation. IOSH magazine speaks to Ho Siong Hin, Senior Director at International WSH, to find out how Singapore has taken Robens’ philosophy forward.
It has been 16 years since Singapore introduced the Workplace Safety and Health (WSH) Act 2006 and the city state’s OSH achievements speak for themselves.
Two years previously, Singapore’s fatal injury rate had been 4.9 per 100,000 workers yet four years later, in 2008, it dropped to 2.9 per 100,000 workers.
In 2019, the year before the global COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill, the fatal injury rate had more than halved to 1.1 per 100,000 workers. The current statistic is 0.9 per 100,000 but reflects the lockdown conditions.
As Ho Siong Hin, Senior Director at International WSH in Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower (MOM) explains, much of this achievement is down to the performance-based approach brought about by the WSH Act 2006 and the close collaboration with employers and employees.
This legislation is aligned to the recommendations contained in Lord Alfred Robens’ ground-breaking 1972 report and is based on the principle that it is those who create the risks who are responsible for managing or mitigating them.
Factories first
A former British colony, Singapore’s first OSH regime, which came into force in 1973, was based on Britain’s Factories Act 1961, and remained in force until 2005. However, it only covered factories and its penalties were generally low.
‘The [Singapore] Factories Act was very prescriptive in terms of specifying how to make the workplace safe,’ explains Siong Hin.
‘We moved to a performance-based law, so it is what you achieve as an outcome rather than how you do it.’
Adopting the Robens’ philosophy, the WSH Act 2006 focuses on the employer’s ability to manage the risk. In other words, ‘whether there is an injury or not is not the issue. It’s about making the workplace and the processes safe,’ he explains.
The shift in approach came about after a serious accident in 2004 which left four people dead after tunnelling work under a major highway led to its collapse.
‘The Minister for Manpower said that while we were one of the better countries in the region in terms of safety and health performance, we were still far behind the European countries and even Japan, so we embarked on a total revamp of the system,’ he explains.
Initially, when the WSH Act 2006 came into force it only covered certain sectors. However, the intention was that the legislation would cover all industries and this has been the case since 2016.
‘Britain uses the term “goal-setting” and we found that when we wanted to change our legislation to be more “goal-setting”, industry was quite apprehensive and a bit lost about what we meant,’ he explains.
‘We explained it was about how they performed. Hence, the term “performance based”. We started on a journey to set up a sort of industry-ownership approach, encouraging industry to take more interest and change themselves.’
WSH Council
This led to the creation of the Workplace Safety & Health (WSH) Council in Singapore, an arms-length body funded by the ministry. Tripartite in nature, the WSH Council includes representatives from government, employers, trade unions and academics.
The WSH Council has three main areas of work, the first of which is to help encourage ownership among employers and raise standards of OSH practice.
Siong Hin explains that Singapore has a code of practice that provides employers with guidance on how they should manage OSH. However, the legislation is also very clear that the MOM will take regulatory action if employers don’t achieve the standard of OSH performance that is expected.
The second area is capability building. ‘The law is one tool we have but we also need to help industry to build their capability so they are able to manage themselves rather than rely on the government or an OSH specialist,’ he explains.
‘To enable this, we’ve set up a training framework which WSH Council oversees and that helps to create industrial ownership because they are undertaking the training.’
The third, and final, area is raising awareness of what good performance looks like. Like the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in Great Britain, the WSH Council provides educational materials for industry but its more independent role means employers perceive it differently.
‘We wanted to create a different relationship between the enforcement part which remains with the MOM and the promotion part undertaken by the industry-led WSH Council,’ he says. ‘At the same time, there is a good link between the two that reinforces each other.’
In 2005, just before the WSH Act came into force, the MOM introduced its first ten-year plan with the goal of halving the fatal injury rate to 2.5 per 100,000 workers by 2015. However, in 2008, two years after the new regulatory system’s introduction, Singapore had already reduced the fatal injury rate down to 2.9 per 100,000 workers.
Tougher targets
‘The Prime Minister then said that a target of achieving a fatal injury rate of 2.5 per 100,000 worker by 2015 was too easy as we were nearly there,’ says Siong Hin.
‘He set a new ten-year target from 2008 and said that he wanted to achieve below 1.8 per 100,000 workers. Industry responded that there was no way they could achieve that and if they could do it, it would come at a cost to the industry. He replied, “If I were you, I would just do it. Life is precious. We just need to do it”.’
In the end, a group of more enlightened firms took the lead, he continues, and agreed to set stricter standards as long as the MOM helped other industries to ‘level up’. ‘We said that we would be fair in terms of enforcement but on the other hand we would be firm when we take action. That’s how industry accepted it.’
In February 2018, the WSH Council and MOM reported 42 workplace fatalities in 2017, down from 66 in 2016, which was the equivalent of a fatal injury rate of 1.2 per 100,000 workers, exceeding its 2008 target.
Culture change
One of the biggest impacts, he explains, has been a seismic cultural shift among employers, many of whom now aspire to achieve zero accidents. The WSH Council runs a vision zero programme to help these progressive companies to achieve zero accidents and the aspiration is to reduce the national fatal injury rate to below 1 per 100,000 workers.
The safety professional’s role has been another important influencer. Prior to the WSH Act, the law was very prescriptive about employing a certain number of safety professionals across industries especially the higher risk ones.
When the new legislation came into force, all of the prescriptive requirements were removed, including the legal requirement on how safety professionals need to perform, for instance, number of hours and taking minutes of meetings. Safety professionals could be employed but responsibility now rests with management. Safety professionals have an advisory role.
‘Interestingly, while the law did not stipulate that workplaces must employ safety professionals, more and more workplaces employed them because they wanted to, not because the law says they needed to,’ he says.
‘You found that even low-risk sectors started employing safety professionals for their workplaces, even though there is no law requiring them.’
Although most of the focus remains on safety, the MOM’s second ten-year plan, introduced in 2018, has a much stronger emphasis on health. The global pandemic and its impact on Singapore businesses has pushed health, particularly mental health, even further up the agenda.
Reporting and enforcement powers
Under the WSH Act 2006, all incidents, including occupational health-related injuries, which lead to three days of absence, must be reported to the MOM, says Siong Hin. Fatalities must be reported within 24 hours.
The MOM has a range of enforcement powers at its disposal. For example, MOM inspectors can issue on the spot fines for minor offences ranging up to S$5,000 (approximately £2,800).
They also have stop orders that they can impose on the spot, for instance, if they see unsafe work at height practices. Inspectors also have remedial orders, which are similar to the HSE’s improvement notices. Siong Hin explains that these are a really useful, flexible tool because they can be applied across different work environments and at specific risks that have been identified.
Singapore relies heavily on migrant workers, particularly in the construction sector. As the MOM provides the work permits that enable migrant workers to be employed, Siong Hin says that the ministry can impose a sliding scale of penalties to encourage improvements in safety performance, which can be extended to removing the work permits or even refusing to issue them.
If there has been a serious accident with strong public interest, especially those with multiple fatalities, the MOM will set up a committee of inquiry with a judge and two assessors who will look through the case in detail. The maximum fine for a fatality is S$500,000 (approx. £278,500), although the Singapore courts can impose a fine of up to S$1m (£557,000) for repeat offences, he says.
