Food Safety News – November 2010
The Young Report
This month saw the release of the long awaited Lord Young’s review on health and safety law entitled; ‘Common Sense, Common Safety’. This review will, if the recommendations are adopted, have far reaching effects on how both food safety and health and safety is enforced in the United Kingdom.
The emphasis appears to rest on a realistic, ‘common sense’ approach to enforcement and legislation and the need for qualified, professional consultants and therefore removing some of the more unnecessary burden put on small businesses. Hygiene Audit Systems welcomes this approach and has always adopted a straight forward attitude to health and safety and food safety in our training courses, consultancy and legal advice.
The recommendations are summarised as follows:
Compensation culture
- Simplified claims procedure
- Extend limit for road traffic accident injury to £25,000
- Introduce the recommendations in lord justice Jackson’s review in civil litigation costs.
- Restrict the operation of injury lawyers and control volume and type of advertising
- Clarification that people who volunteer will not be held liable for consequences.
Low hazard workplaces
- Simplify risk assessment procedure
- Create periodic checklists to ensure legal compliance as well as online video demonstrations.
- HSE to develop similar checklist for voluntary organisations
- Exempt employers from risk assessing employees working from home
- Exempt self-employed people from risk assessments
Raising standards
- Professionalise health and safety consultants with an accredited qualification
- Establishing a web based directory for accredited health and safety consultants
Insurance
- Insurance companies to remove the need for businesses to employ health and safety consultants
- Only accredited health and safety consultants should be used
- Insurance companies should draw up a code of practice for the voluntary sector
Education
- Simplify the process for school trips
- Introduce a single consent form to cover all school activities
- Introduce simplified risk assessments for classrooms
- Shift to a system of risk-benefit assessment
- Consider review of Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 to separate play and leisure from workplace contexts.
Local authorities
- Officials who ban events of health and safety grounds should put their reasons in writing
- Enable citizens to challenge local authority decisions
- Citizens to be able to refer ‘unfair’ decisions to the ombudsman
Health and safety legislation
- HSE to create Code of Practice focused on small businesses in low risk activities
- Current health and safety regulations to be consolidated into single set of accessible regulations
- UK to take the lead in co-operating with other member states to ensure European rules are proportionate and do not necessarily attempt to eliminate all risk
RIDDOR
- Review RIDDOR to extend the current ‘three day injury’ to seven days.
- HSE to review RIDDOR to determine if this is the best approach to gain an accurate national picture of workplace accidents
Working with larger companies
- HSE to have an enhanced role for large, multi-site retail businesses
Combining food safety and health and safety inspections
- Local authorities to combine food safety and health and safety inspectors
- Make participation in the FSA Food Hygiene Rating Scheme, mandatory
- Promote usage of the FHRS scheme using local and national media
- Encourage voluntary display of ratings, possibly make it compulsory
- Results of inspections to be available online in an open and standardised way
- Open the delivery of inspections to accredited certification bodies, therefore reducing the burden on local authorities
Police and fire services
- Police officers and fire fighters not to be at risk of prosecution under health and safety legislation when engaged in the course of their duties if they have put themselves at risk as a result of committing a heroic act.
Adventure training
- Abolish the Adventure Activities Licensing Authority and replace licencing with a code of practice.
We can offer a range of support services to help your business ensure all Safety Management Systems are effectively implemented.
Please call our team of EHP's at our office on 01727 866779 or email principals@hygieneauditsystems.com
