One of the main functions of the Legislation Update Service (LUS) is to keep you up to date with changes to legislation, so that you’re confident in fulfilling your legal compliance obligations.
ISO auditors will often check that you are staying up to date with legal changes, so if your organisation is certified to ISO 14001, ISO 45001 or ISO 50001, it’s vital that you regularly review and maintain your legal register.
In this article we explain how we add new legislation to LUS and how to keep on top of changes to demonstrate your organisation’s continued commitment to legal compliance. We also look at how to find legislation on LUS that only exists as an update to an existing piece of legislation.
How we add new legislation in LUS
Our team of consultants review new UK, EU and Irish legislation daily and add all relevant environmental and occupational health and safety (EHS) legislation into LUS. With registers set up using profile codes, this means that registers are only updated with new legislation and updates that are relevant to your organisation.
There are 3 main ways we add new legislation:
- New entries – for standalone pieces of legislation we will add a separate new entry into LUS explaining what the legislation covers and what the key duties are.
- Updates – for new legislation that only amends existing legislation we don’t add a separate entry, instead we add this as an update under the legislation it’s amending. If the update changes key information and duties we’ll update the summary and duties sections for the main legislation entry at the same time.
- New entries and updates – some legislation exists as a standalone piece of law, whilst also making amendments to existing law. In this case, we’ll add both a new entry and updates to relevant existing entries.
Regardless of how we add new content to LUS, subscribers are notified of updates monthly via email and can also view the changes in their dashboard and updates section of LUS.
Why additional legislation may appear in your register
Sometimes you might see an existing piece of law appear in your register that wasn’t previously there. This can happen where legislation previously had no environment or health and safety relevance, but a subsequent update adds in EHS requirements.
We also periodically review the profile codes in LUS and may add additional profile codes to legislation as the law changes. For example, for legislation entries covering the exploitation of aggregates and associated levies we recently added the profile code ‘Manufacture and supply of construction products’ bringing these entries into registers which have that profile code selected.
We try to minimise such changes but also need to ensure registers remain as accurate and comprehensive as possible. We therefore recommend checking on a regular basis and before an audit that your register is up to date, with all entries having the correct compliance status set.
Reviewing new legislation updates
If your organisation is certified to ISO standards, it’s important to review and assess changes to duties made through both new legislation and changes to existing legislation.
Identifying new entries that require review
As well as through monthly updates emails, entries in a register that haven’t been reviewed, including new entries, can be easily identified from the dashboard, as they will have no traffic light status set (coloured grey), as shown below:
In the example above, there is 1 entry in each register that needs to be reviewed. Clicking on the grey bar will take you directly to the list of any entries which do not currently have a status set for review. Additional information on how to set the relevance of legislation, applying a traffic light status, adding comments and actions can be found here.
Identifying updates that require review
Updates can be reviewed by clicking the links on the monthly update email, LUS dashboard or updates section. This will take you directly to the update where you can click on the action list icon shown underneath an update:
This will then give 2 options:
- Record that there is no change in compliance.
- Create a compliance comment and action.
If you’re ISO certified, an auditor will expect you to have reviewed all updates to legislation since your most recent certification / re-certification.
Additional information on keeping on top of changes to legislation can be found here.
Searching for legislation in LUS
One of the common queries we get from subscribers is where to find an update that doesn’t have its own entry on LUS and therefore isn’t listed in their register. You can search directly in LUS for legislation and this will show any entries that make reference to that law, including within updates.
For example, if we search on LUS for “Directive (EU) 2024/3099” it will show us 1 result for the entry covering Directive 2009/16/EC on port State control. In this example Directive (EU) 2024/3099 doesn’t have its own entry, as it just amends the 2009 Directive.
(Using quotation marks (“ and “) around text will return only results which are an exact match to the search term.)
If we then look at the updates section within that entry it will show us a summary of the update made by Directive (EU) 2024/3099:
As in the example above we try to keep updates focused on what a subscriber needs to know, if there are no relevant duties or changes to duties we’ll highlight this.
Adding other requirements in LUS
You may want to add additional requirements into LUS beyond the EHS legislation and standards we cover. This can be useful for adding non-EHS requirements, organisational or industry requirements, or anything else you need to ensure you maintain compliance with.
You add your own entries on LUS using the other requirements function explained here and these will include all the standard functions in LUS, such as adding comments, setting the compliance status, assigning compliance actions and adding review dates.
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