Lord Young Report - 'Common Sense, Common Safety'

The Report refers to the climate of fear arising out of the perceived compensation culture. This is accompanied by the observation that this fear was, “compounded by the actions of some health and safety consultants, many without any professional qualifications, who have a perverse incentive to take an overzealous approach to applying the health and safety regulations”. This, it was said, led to the “goal of eliminating all risk from the workplace instead of setting out the rational, proportionate approach that the Health and Safety at Work etc Act demands”.

My first thought was, “Steady on! How convenient to place responsibility on the doorstep of health and safety consultants, whilst under-playing the rigour of the health and safety enforcing authorities when it comes to them bringing enforcement action”.

However, as I read on it became clear that Lord Young’s recommendation is that health and safety consultants should have to be appropriately qualified, as well as professionally accredited. What he wants is for health and safety consultants to be like ours here at Bibby Consulting and Support. In delivering our health and safety services we only use qualified health and safety consultants, all members of appropriate professional bodies, and all of whom would be accredited under Lord Young’s proposals.

Further, the service our consultants give has always been guided by a principle of risk aware, not risk averse - and we pride ourselves in the delivery of sound, pragmatic and common sense advice.

The more I thought about it the more I was convinced that Bibby Consulting and Support could easily be a benchmark. We have never tried to promote our services by generating a climate of fear, taking the view that that would be counter-productive to promoting a sound health and safety culture combined with effective health and safety management for our clients. The Report advocates simplified systems for low hazard environments and invites HSE to work on templates – and we have rolled out numerous such systems for our clients who have such workplaces. The balance is that, when we see clients with real and significant risks, then we ensure that the framework we help to put in place is capable of the rigour that is needed and warranted for those situations.

We have majored on creating a climate of re-assurance – so that our health and safety systems provide a straightforward and user-friendly compliance framework, at the right level, appropriate to the client’s activity. In that respect we are, we believe, absolutely at one with Lord Young’s recommendations.