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Practice meets perfect
May/June 2023 issue

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What the first fruits of Brexit might mean

Open-access content Sunday 24th July 2016
From the archive:  Just so you know, this article is more than 3 years old.

The effects on inward investment, the balance of trade with Europe and the rest of the world and overall economic growth rates are almost impossible to predict as they will be influenced by too many variables.

But there were a few immediate repercussions. One of these was the change of prime minister midway through last month, followed by changes at the top of most ministries.

The reshuffle brought Penny Mordaunt to the post of disability minister, with OSH regulation in general and the Health and Safety Executive in particular as part of her portfolio.

In her former post at the Ministry of Defence, Mordaunt was tasked last year with apologising on behalf of the government for the deaths of three army reservists from heat stroke on a selection exercise in the Brecon Beacons in 2013.

She said that training military personnel to the highest level involved individuals taking some risk. "However as an organisation we must ensure that this is balanced with the need to ensure the risks are effectively mitigated," she noted.

Her previous post was parliamentary under-secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government. There she supported a Bill to give the local government ombudsman the power to investigate complaints that local authorities had unfairly stopped public events on safety grounds.

Mordaunt promised the Bill "will not weaken the very necessary and important health and safety arrangements that exist to protect employees and the public health and safety regime in place nationally".

Such statements suggest a sympathy with the current OSH infrastructure which is welcome at a time when some fear that Brexit could provide an opportunity for softening the UK's regulatory regime on worker protection in the name of deregulation. That's not something that would be welcomed by the leading safety and health bodies.

Nor, it seems, by practitioners. A request in our weekly e-newsletter for readers to nominate regulations that could be overhauled post-Brexit drew no suggestions from almost 40,000 recipients.

The only government comment on the issue since the referendum came on 21 July from attorney general Jeremy Wright in response to Labour member Nick Thomas-Symonds' request for an assurance Brexit would not weaken OSH laws. Wright's answer: "it'll not in all likelihood be the case that all of those rules and regulations will be dispensed with altogether", fell short of the guarantee Thomas-Symonds was seeking.

In this early period of flux after what is likely to have been an epoch-defining decision, there will be many people and businesses who would be glad of some clarity in this area. But as with so many other aspects of the post-Brexit settlement, we will have to just keep reading the signs.

You may also be interested in...

 Brexit: what will happen to OSH regulation?

Monday 27th June 2016
How much of our worker protection legislation will be reset depends on a combination of economic and political necessity.There is no doubting the union’s influence on our safety and health law. The think tank Open Europe calculated that two-thirds of OSH-related regulations introduced between 1997 and 2009 originated in the EU.But there are good reasons not to unpick our framework, however it was acquired and however “glorious” the opportunity for change.
Open-access content

 Keeping OSH central to a changing world of work

Sunday 24th July 2016
As IOSH positions itself for its next strategic period, it is timely to consider some of the big trends that may well shape the future of the world of work and our profession. The world population is growing and ageing, but there are demographic imbalances. In the industrial countries, populations are either stagnating or declining, but in developing countries, they are booming. In industrial countries, immigration is likely to increase, not just to fill the skills shortages caused by population decline, but as a result of armed conflicts and environmental problems.
Open-access content

 Time to get moving

Tuesday 9th August 2016
Causality is easier to evidence where there is physical activity with a demonstrable consequence; the injury or fatality caused by an accident can be seen and investigated. Yet a series of studies and surveys are shedding light on what has become one of the under-reported occupational health issues of our time: sedentariness.In this age of email and the internet, with more of us working from home or in office environments, it is clear a growing proportion of us are sitting down and physically inactive for long periods of the day at work.
Open-access content

 Is business ready for self-regulation?

Wednesday 29th June 2016
There is no doubt that regulation has its place in stating society’s minimum expectations and in providing a clear framework against which all organisations can measure themselves. There must also be a punitive system to address dutyholders who fall short of these standards. However, with less prescriptive regulation and a drive – in the UK at least – to reduce the regulatory burden on business, we should all do more to define good OSH performance and promote it around the world.
Open-access content

 Health budgets may need defending post Brexit decision

Monday 26th September 2016
They revealed there was no decline in domestic spending in the British economy after the vote to leave the European Union in June. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has now rowed back slightly on its pessimism about the initial impact of the Brexit decision, upgrading its UK growth forecast to 1.8% for 2016. Share prices are buoyant and the pound’s post-referendum slide against the dollar has stopped. So far, so good; those who predicted an immediate economic tumble after the referendum have been wrongfooted.
Open-access content

 The balance of labour regulation and business flexibility post-Brexit

Tuesday 22nd November 2016
They pointed out their administrations had been responsible for enacting Britain’s first UK safety and health statute: the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act 1902. They also claimed credit for successive factories acts and for drafting the Health and Safety at Work Act in the early 1970s – though it was passed into law by a Labour government.
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