Lets not try the beef burgers just yet Mr Cameron.

It's an odd situation. Multinational corporations who are benefitting from the UK's light touch regulation and oversight are frustrating politicians, who have been "business friendly" in the past, but other issues such as health and safety are being redesigned to allow more self regulation.

When it was in the interests of the UK to bring in the consumer culture and provide a place for us to buy over priced coffee and cheap mortgages and financing, the government of the day was more than happy to oblige with light touch and self regulation on tax and banking. Anyone remember a banking crisis and a massive public bail out? Add to that the really successful self regulation of the press that has been shown to be an utter failure.

We now get to a position where instead of rationalising health and safety regulation we are throwing out the ability to regulate properly. The streamlining of regulation and reducing the unnecessary bureaucracy of over 400 council's each regulating Tesco is understandable and necessary, however we are on the verge of a crisis.

The recent move to lighten the regulatory ability of councils and the HSE and the constant stamping on the health and safety professional is likely to lead to another crisis where self and light touch regulation fails spectacularly. Maybe not in nuclear power or construction, but in shops and offices where often health and safety regulations are "too expensive" to comply with. how many EHP's have come across shops that are dangerously overstocked, blocked fire exits and really dumb things that if they had not been caught could have led to serious injury or incident. How many warehouses have had serious incidents where fork lifts had been considered a toy or not serious enough to maintain. How many catering slips and trips have been investigated. We may not see all these inspections being chucked on the scrap heap, and there will be topic inspections into the future, but there's a real danger here that is not being acknowledged.

When we are talking about Health and Safety regulation the government is happy to take a light touch approach and reset the clock to 1974 and as far as one can see this is all borne from a desire to remove the compensation culture and provide a friendly trading environment for big business. The first one is understandable but the second one is what has led to the financial and taxation issues we see today. Unfortunately health and safety regulation is suffering from the terminal conservative (note I don't say Conservative) approach of giving business what they want until the wheels come off. Then the government of the day will lambast the last one that allowed this to happen, but it will take many years and possibly decades to repair the damage once that damage has been realised.

Wherever there is a financial interest that conflicts with the self regulation philosophy, self regulation is going to fail. It's like communism, a nice idea until the people in charge realise they can control the system to their own benefit. It's human nature at the end of the day, looking after number one.

Lets not try the beef burgers just yet Mr Cameron and learn the lessons from the past.

Welcome

Hi, and welcome to my new blog.  This blog is not intended to be expert advice or all knowing knowledge on the profession, just an EHO's musings and commentary on the profession, events and funny stuff.  I'm not hiding my ideaideatity for any other reason than I really don't see the need for fame.  I just want to be anonymous.  Be assured I won't be doing hatchet jobs or have a particular bias, up however I am slightly lefty...

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