Health and Safety changes for self-employed

A report on Health and Safety has recommended that self-employed people whose work activities pose no potential risk of harm to others should be exempt from Health and Safety regulations.

The report Reclaiming Health and Safety for all: An independent review of health and safety legislation, written for the Department of Work and Pensions, also recommends changes to Health and Safety regulations to ease the burden on regulation on businesses.

The biggest change that Professor Ragnar E. Löfstedt recommends is:

Exempting from health and safety law those self-employed whose work activities pose no potential risk of harm to others.

Although the EU regulations generally don’t apply to the self-employed, there is in this country an obligation on self-employed people to “conduct their work in a way that they and other persons affected by their work are not exposed to risks to their health or safety.”

The report uses comparisons to other countries to show that this is more onerous than in other EU member states:

in Sweden the self-employed are only covered in relation to chemicals and machinery to protect their safety and that of those who may be affected by their work, whilst in Germany the law does not apply to the self-employed except where their work may affect the safety of employees.

It is by following this example that the report recommends that Health and Safety laws should be relaxed for the self-employed. This would only apply to those people whose work doesn’t have an effect on others. But the report estimates that to be about one million people.

This would not change the obligations that other people had towards self-employed workers, not would it include all self-employed people.

One of the main benefits would be that currently:

There is evidence to suggest that almost one in five of those who work alone already consider health and safety regulation as a significant or total barrier to taking on their first employees

The other changes are consolidation and revision of existing regulations, in order to clarify and simplify the amount of regulation that businesses have to be aware of; and a review of the Approved Codes of Practice to make them more accessible, and less technical.

The overall aim is to bring certainty and accessibility to the regulations – this will make it easier for businesses to know what the regulations are and how to comply with them.