Health and Safety at Work etc. Act – Happy 50th Birthday!

The 31st July 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act (HSWA). We look back at its role in making UK workplaces some of the safest in the world and why it remains as the country’s single most important piece of occupational health and safety law.

Background

By 1974, attempts to overhaul workplace health, safety and welfare in the UK were long overdue. Existing legislation was inconsistent and only applied to specific sectors and industries such as factories, agriculture, mines and quarries, leaving millions of workers with no legal health and safety protection in their workplace.

The Employed Persons (Health and Safety) Bill had been proposed in 1970, the same year the USA passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act into federal law, but concerns that that the Bill did not address key issues meant it would be another 4 years until the Act as we know it became law, following a committee of inquiry and the Robens Report being published in 1972.

HSWA introduced:

• common legal duties for employers, employees and others which apply equally across all workplaces;
• the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) as the national regulator for workplace health and safety in Britain;
• powers to introduce health and safety regulations and approved codes of practice;
• enforcement powers for authorities; and
• rules relating to health and safety offences.

HSWA today

The HSE’s public register of convictions shows that during the past 12 months breaches of HSWA was involved in well over half of successful prosecutions and resulted in 8 of the 10 highest fines issued, of which all were at least £1 million.

At the heart of HSWA’s ongoing relevance is its simplicity in applying general duties to protect people. The most common section of HSWA breached resulting in prosecution and conviction is 2(1):

‘It shall be the duty of every employer to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of all his employees.’

Beyond the use of outdated gender-specific language in reference to an employer, the wording of duties under HSWA has been key to its ongoing effectiveness. The general duty to protect workers under section 2(1):

• applies equally to all employers regardless of size or sector;
• requires employers to protect employees from all types of harm, including psychological as well as physical harm; and
•  is flexible in how duties can be fulfilled using the term ‘so far as is reasonably practicable’.

‘So far as is reasonably practicable’ requires that the level of effort in protecting workers (and others through wider duties) is proportionate to the level of risk of harm, i.e. it would be expected that employers invest more time and money in controlling hazards where the level of risk is higher.

Unlike in other criminal prosecutions where a defendant may be presumed innocent until proven guilty, where there is a breach of duty under HSWA, it is up to the defendant to prove they fulfilled their duty in a way that was reasonably practicable.

The Future

There have been discussions over the years about modernising the Act, in particular some of the wording, but it’s not expected that the new UK Government will look to overhaul an Act which continues to be as effective today as when it was passed by a new UK Government 50 years ago.

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