Strategy

Scott Crichton CMIOSH, principal health and safety consultant at WorkNest, identifies common health and safety policy mistakes – and how to get it right next time.

How the health and safety world has been transformed since Lord Alfred Robens' report in 1972.

The 1972 Robens report and the organisations it gave birth to transformed health and safety in Britain and has shown remarkable adaptability even half a century later.

Business owners and managers in South Korea face significantly tougher penalties for serious accidents or fatalities when new enforcement rules are introduced this week.

Employers need to ensure they are ready to provide the same level of protection to workers who carry out casual work as employees who have a contract of employment when amended personal protective equipment (PPE) regulations come into force on 6 April (https://www.hse.gov.uk/ppe/index.htm).

IOSH has urged employers to continually review their OSH measures and ensure they are ‘proportionate and fit for purpose’ after Great Britain's Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) annual figures for work-related ill-health, injury and enforcement highlighted the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on British workers’ health.

More than 19 million people in the UK formally volunteer at least once in a 12-month period through a group, club or organisation. In the majority of cases, the work activities these volunteers undertake are low risk.

The word ‘unprecedented’ has become so overused in any conversation about the coronavirus pandemic, it is hard to find superlatives, but what has certainly been ‘remarkable’ in the health and safety space has been the rapid response co-ordinated between government, regulators, duty-holders and workers.

A forklift driver whose employer accused him of a ‘serious breach of health and safety processes’ for attending work while his son awaited the results of a Covid test has won his claim for unfair dismissal.

OSH professionals are critical to establishing the compliance culture and safety management rules that will keep both civil and criminal litigation risk in the UK at bay.