Wider better regulation initiatives - Working to the Hampton Agenda

Projects that address the wider better regulation agenda, such as HSE’s responses to the recommendations of the Hampton Review, do not usually directly simplify legislative requirements. However, they are a major part of HSE’s commitment to being a modern regulator and make a significant impact on the way health and safety legislation impacts on its dutyholders.

In 2005 Phillip Hampton published the report of his review Reducing administrative burdens - effective administration and enforcement. The recommendations he made look at regulation and enforcement covering six areas (see sub-headings below). HSE has developed a number of initiatives that support better regulation and work to bring HSE ever more closely into line with the Hampton recommendations. These initiatives do not directly simplify legislative requirements but they are creating a culture of policy development where better regulation principles and the drive to simplify and minimise the cost of requirements are intrinsic parts of the process.

Design of regulations

In developing policies and legislation HSE has adopted a number of practices designed to embed better regulation and challenge policy officials to think about simplification:

• HSE has implemented the use of Common Commencement Dates - to reduce the time businesses spent scanning for regulatory changes.
• HSE’s Small Business Trade Association Forum - the membership has been increased and SBTAF contributes proactively to policy development.
• HSE’s Challenge Panel - challenges policymaking and ensures that newly implemented legislation successfully achieves its policy objectives. The Panel considers the best approach to intervention and questions whether it should be regulatory or non-regulatory.
• HSE has set up a Better Regulation Oversight Group (BROG), made up of senior officials and chaired by the Deputy Chief Executive. BROG works to ensure better regulation initiatives retains a high profile within HSE and provides high level support and direction to the relevant projects.
• Better Policy Making seminars, run by HSE’s Better Regulation Team - guide HSE policy officials in fully considering simplification options and properly assessing the impact of their policy proposals at an early stage.

Together these processes are designed to reduce the cost of compliance with existing legislation for businesses and to minimise the costs of any new requirements.

Advice and guidance

Health and Safety Awareness Officers (HSAOs) visit businesses, especially SMEs, and provide advice and guidance face to face to help the business understand its legal obligations and how to protect the health and safety of its staff in an efficient and proportionate way.

HSE’s project to improve information and guidance to SMEs is a new initiative, working across HSE, designed to ensure all HSE guidance is written with small businesses in mind.

In order to encourage compliance with health and safety requirements, it is important that health and safety maintains a good reputation with stakeholders. ‘Myth of the Month’ is a major, high profile element of a strategy to defend that reputation. It refutes one erroneous report of a health and safety requirement each month, building up a series of simple, graphic web pages that clarify what is really required and, just as importantly, what is not.

Workplace Health Connect is a pilot project designed as an alternative to regulation, to provide free, tailored, practical advice on workplace health and safety, for both managers and staff. It aims to transfer knowledge and skills direct to workers and employers, so they can tackle future issues themselves. The pilot was initiated in February 2006 to run for two years. By its end the target is to have generated benefits to firms from avoided reportable injuries of £8.7 million, including a reduction in the administrative activities associated with reportable injuries.

HSE is supporting stakeholder-led guidance in a number of workstreams across the organisation. These include in particular:

• the ‘Go Skills’ training package for bus/coach, taxi/private hire and other transport industries, which includes health and safety messages; and
• the guidance developed by the Institute of Directors, with HSE, for company directors to explain their duties under health and safety law.

Clear, pragmatic and well-targeted advice and guidance helps to ensure businesses understand what is expected of them and so not incur unnecessary or disproportionate compliance costs.

Inspections

HSE has been a founder member and key stakeholder in the Retail Enforcement Pilot. This project has been testing joint working across different local authority regulatory services undertaking similar regulatory visits to a common business group in the retail sector. HSE's involvement has secured closer joint working of Local Authority Environmental Health Officers who undertake health and safety inspections of retail premises with Trading Standards and Fire Officers, thus driving down the number of routine planned inspections, improving co-ordination of effort across services, enhancing business education and improving worker and consumer protection.

HSE created the Strategic Enabling Programme “Local Authorities and HSE Working Together” to establish the LA/HSE Partnership. The Programme ran from 2004 until Autumn 2006. The aim was to improve how HSE and Local Authorities (LAs) work together through the creation of a closer partnership. Elements within this include:

• LA/HSE partnership teams established in HSE’s regional offices
• a stronger voice for local government in health and safety strategy and policy
• an interactive extranet connection allowing LAs access to HSE and other LA’s electronic legal, technical and policy information
  better access to common guidance, technical support and training
• aligning planning and timing between LAs and HSE on major work initiatives such as the Fit3 Strategic Programme
• The programme’s success this year has been in the form of vastly improved communication between HSE and LAs on the Fit3 work.

HSE’s Large Organisation Partnership Pilot (LOPP). This pilot project aims to ensure that firms' priorities are taken properly into account by regulators, and regulatory interventions better tailored to the firms’ needs, avoiding interventions that are irrelevant or redundant. This, in turn, will lead to more effective and efficient use of regulators' resources. External consultants have been engaged to undertake a ‘lessons learnt’ study of the pilot and make recommendations for future activity. The report on this research is planned for Autumn 2008.

HSE has developed regulatory principles by which it targets its inspection activities. Our enforcement policy statement sets out how enforcement decisions are made. They must be:

• targeted - focusing on what is important
• transparent - it is clear what we do, and how and why we do it
• proportionate - the action taken is in proportion to the circumstances
• consistent - we take the same action in equivalent circumstances
• accountable - we can justify our choices and actions.

A recent review of our enforcement policy statement confirmed that our stakeholders support this approach.

In the 2006 simplification plan HSE outlined a number of projects where work had been initiated with other regulators, including the Local Authorities. This work continues to progress:

• The Moving Goods Safely initiative evaluation of phase 2 is underway and the project has moved into its third phase of joint inspection activity with LAs, working on a national level. Linked to the inspection activity will be a major workplace transport awareness raising campaign.
• As part of Moving Goods Safely, initiatives have been undertaken with the Traffic Commissioners and the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency. Other industry projects and further cooperation is also planned.
• A Metropolitan Police and Transport for London joint pilot project on the safety of freight transport began in Autumn 2006. HSE provided training for Met police officers and HSWA powers have been delegated. The police and TfL have set performance measures and the project is underway, with regular meetings between TfL, the Met and HSE planned.
• HSE, Civil Aviation Authority and aviation industry cooperation is now on-going. Formal and informal lines of communication, including a protocol for joint inspections planned at a local level, have been successfully created. Cooperation is also in place on airside safety management systems and new international standards.
• HSE, Maritime and Coastguard Agency and Marine Accident Investigation Branch co-operation is also in place. The next HSE/MCA/MAIB memorandum of understanding meeting to ensure on-going co-operation is in November 2007.
• The initiative with the Driving Standards Agency stakeholder group has resulted in the ‘Go Skills’ training package for transport industries (see paragraph 106), which includes embedded health and safety messages. There is now regular liaison with Go Skills.
• The LA Partnership project successfully continues to provide more co-ordinated, consistent and effective enforcement service. The April 2007 target of 40% of LAs working towards health and safety public service agreement (PSA) targets was exceeded by a significant margin. The target for April 2008 is 80% of working towards the PSA targets with a view to 100% take up.
  

All the initiatives outlined above, together with LOPP, are designed to provide businesses with real benefits, such as co-ordination and consistency in inspections, removal of duplication and cost savings.

Data requests

HSE has developed the ‘business on-line’ project looking at the issues and practical challenges involved in making all HSE forms available to be completed electronically. The system is being piloted using internal forms in the first instance, but it is planned that in the longer term it will be possible to submit all information to HSE via interactive on-line forms if businesses prefer.

Once complete, the business on-line project is expected to have a significant impact on the administrative burden imposed on businesses by HSE forms.

In parallel with the removal of all the outdated forms, HSE has in place a forms gatekeeping process by which any proposal to create a new form requires justification and an assessment of the need for the form.

Sanctions

The Enforcement Programme team and its high-level plan were established in Autumn 2005. The programme’s primary aim was to develop proposals to enable HSE and LAs to make best use of formal enforcement in the delivery of health and safety priorities alongside the enabling of justice.  Phase 1 of the programme examined HSE’s and LA’s formal enforcement activities and made recommendations for action to enable HSE and LAs to:

• undertake prosecutions and conduct the associated investigation work more effectively and efficiently, where appropriate, using these activities to support delivery of HSE’s targets;
• determine whether more should be done to target and enforce against those who deliberately flout the law and put others at risk for financial gain;
• optimise and sustain, through communications, the ripple and deterrent effect of these activities.

Phase 1 of the Enforcement Programme came to an end in Autumn 2006. Phase 2 is designed to ensure that recommendations from phase 1 are implemented, evaluate the benefits arising and recommend any further actions necessary.

Phase 2 was initiated in February 2007 and its workstreams are making good progress against the plan. It is planned to run until December 2007.

Focus on Outcomes

The Fit3 programme, HSE’s strategic programme (Fit for Work, Fit for Life, Fit for Tomorrow) is designed to achieve better health and safety outcomes, specifically HSC/E’s PSA targets, through communication rather than additional regulation. Projects within the programme are based on evidence, followed by consultation with stakeholders, which leads onto awareness-raising to embed the behavioural changes that have been identified as necessary to improve health and safety in that area. Fit3 focuses on dutyholders doing what needs to be done to support worker health and safety; actions not paperwork.

Mergers with other regulators

The Hampton Report recommended a number of mergers to reduce the quantity of small regulators. The merger with the health and safety functions of the Engineering Inspectorate was completed in October 2006. HSE was designated to be the adventure activities licensing authority in April 2007.

It was agreed with the Coal Authority (CA) that memoranda of understanding were more appropriate than full merger. A memorandum of Agreement (MoA) covers communication between the CA as licensing authority, and HSE as health and safety regulator. The existing arrangements for co-operation and exchange of information were developed to create ‘Working Arrangements for Inspections’, with the aim of reducing the burden of inspections on mining businesses, for adoption under the MoA and these were signed in May 2006.

The work to merge the Gangmasters Licensing Authority into HSE is underway and a consultation document on the merger will be issued by DEFRA before the end of 2007. At present the aim is for the merger to take place in April 2009.

How the plan fits within the government’s better regulation agenda

HSC/E’s plan can be seen within the context of the Government's programme of regulatory reform, facilitated by BRE. This programme involves all the elements outlined above such as:

• measuring the cost of regulation (and setting targets to reduce it);
• simplifying regulation e.g. considering non-regulatory options and assessing the cost of new regulations;
• streamlining inspection and enforcement by taking forward the recommendations of the Hampton review;
• legislating for reform, the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill is aimed at making it quicker and easier to remove regulatory bureaucracy where burdens are uncontroversial;
• regulation in Europe, how European legislation is applied in the UK.

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