Manufacturing employers attack safety regulation

The EEF manufacturing employers’ organisation has urged the government to “redouble efforts to build an alliance with other EU member states to reduce the burden of health and safety legislation”.

The EEF says its annual health and safety survey showed that companies are concerned at proposals for more legislation and that there is a strong appetite for case study guidance as the best means of improving control of key risks.

Three-quarters of companies in the survey disagreed with European Commission proposals to require that stress and work pressure be considered as part of risk assessments for back pain and other musculoskeletal disorders.

Meanwhile, of the quarter of businesses that worked with ionising radiations, the vast majority (95%) believed that the current law is appropriate and should be neither tightened nor relaxed.

TUC senior health and safety officer Hugh Robertson, commenting in the TUC’s Risks e-bulletin, said he was not be surprised by the results of the survey.

“Employers’ organisations have always called for guidance rather than regulation, despite overwhelming evidence that guidance has almost no effect at all in changing behaviour,” he said.

Rather, Robertson said, there should be “strong and robust regulation to tackle the huge epidemic of stress and musculoskeletal disorders that are responsible for around three-quarters of all work-related sickness absence”.