Regulations that work save lives

The UK Government has published two new strategies to boost business and support economic growth – but they must be underpinned by robust health and safety standards.

The Industrial Strategy is a 10-year plan to drive investment, innovation, and economic growth by supporting eight high-growth sectors. It answers businesses’ concerns around energy costs, skills, and investment prospects to position the UK for growth.

Meanwhile the UK Trade Strategy seeks to protect and boost business through lighter regulation and increased access to finance, making the UK the most connected nation in the world.

While IOSH is glad to see this significant and overdue shift towards a more interventionist, long-term approach to economic growth and industrial policy, it should not be at any cost.

The UK’s standards and approaches to health and safety are among the world’s best, so these must be preserved and embedded, and appropriately funded and resourced if these strategies are to be delivered effectively. The labour market, and protecting and improving workers’ safety, health, wellbeing and performance, must underpin them.

The safety, health, wellbeing, motivation and productivity of working people is critical to the UK’s resilience and its future social and economic sustainability.

Ultimate success will depend on effective, joined-up delivery, balancing targeted and broad-based policies, and the nation’s ability to adapt funding and interventions to evolving economic realities. This includes fostering decent employment and addressing burdens of injuries and chronic ill health caused by work, and the multiple costs and impacts accidents, ill health and deaths have on workers, employers and wider society.

Lazy narrative

The Industrial Strategy aims to accelerate technological adoption and industry transformation. But the blueprint for strengthening the UK’s industrial competitiveness must not come at the expense of worker health and safety rights and protections. The speed of advances in digital technologies, automation, and AI presents new challenges that make workplace safety and labour standards ever more precious.

The Government also warns that the world is more uncertain and volatile than before. Yet this Strategy commits to “reduce regulatory burdens”, including “reducing the number of regulators”, despite the important role of regulators, especially in our high-hazard industries, and the role they will play as we start to adopt new ways of working due to technology advances, and through new energy programmes and development.

"Both the Industrial Strategy and the Trade Strategy seem to cast regulation as ‘red tape’ and ‘bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake’. This is a lazy narrative we have heard for too long"

IOSH

In fact, we know that good regulation – such as the UK’s health and safety goal-setting regulations, with clear rules properly and proportionately applied, resourced and enforced – keep all of us safe, healthy and well while boosting business effectiveness and efficiency.

Keeping workers safe and healthy has become a UK success story over many years, so it should remain something we stand for in the world, central to trade and industry.

For the UK Government to implement these strategies successfully, IOSH recommends it engages further with industry, trade unions, and worker representatives to identify potential hazards and risks, and to plan for, risk assess and implement safeguards into the design stage and before new technologies take hold.

Legislation and enforcement

Some powerful new capabilities of AI, automation and digital integration are already being used to improve workplace safety and health. However, these implementations need to happen within well-governed frameworks, with good consultation and with the required skills.

IOSH urges the Government to strengthen legislative measures that enforce workplace health and safety standards. It needs to ensure policy coherence which champions and builds capacity for good occupational safety and health across legal frameworks to ensure they address the unique risks posed by digital transformation, automation, and AI.

This will help maintain standards of safety and health in the evolving industrial landscape, supporting both economic growth and worker protections and wellbeing.

IOSH is pleased to see that an aim to ‘enhance skills’ is recognised as part of the industrial strategy. However, we do advocate for these skills to include occupational safety and health so a cultural shift in reducing occupational injury, illness and disease in current and future workforces can be realised.

The public may lose trust in the Regulatory Innovation Office’s ability to protect workers’ health and safety if, in its haste to capitalise on innovation, proportionate regulatory oversight is not introduced. This could be especially true with any light-touch approach to AI regulation.

The Government is rightly seeking to boost business and oversee growth in the economy. As part of this, it’s crucial that strong health and safety standards remain core to their plans to ensure workers don’t pay the price.

IOSH is keen to inform the work of the newly established Regulatory Innovation Office and will be writing to its Chair Lord Willetts.