A year ago, Shadow Work and Pensions Minister Andrew Selous pledged that the Tories would not deregulate health and safety laws. He said that there was “no political mileage in going down the deregulation route”.
There were grounds for suspicion that this was Conservative window dressing. Otherwise, Selous had gone seriously off message – particularly as David Cameron had attacked “health and safety culture” just a couple of months earlier at his party’s conference.
Addressing a gathering of health and safety experts and trade union representatives, Selous was presumably playing to the gallery. Tory policy – as evidenced in the party’s policy paper Regulation in the Post-Bureaucratic Age: How to get rid of red tape and reform quangos – has returned firmly to the deregulation camp.
The policy document is scrap and burn in its attitude to regulations. It is crudely populist in the way it plays to fears and prejudices about red tape and health and safety. Such prejudices are stoked by the media and manipulated by those employers who want less workplace safety legislation.
In what appears to be law reform meets The X Factor, Regulation in the Post-Bureaucratic Age proposes to give the public the power to nominate “the most poorly designed and burdensome regulations, which would be repealed within 12 months unless they were modified or approved by Parliament”.
While there is nothing wrong in responding to public opinion, is it really going to be ordinary people leading calls for a particular piece of legislation to be scrapped? Would it be The Sun whipping up sentiments against regulations that supposedly ban children playing conkers? Perhaps that other well-known font of reasonableness and tolerance, the Daily Mail, would root for the equally mythical prohibition on hanging baskets.
It is all strangely reminiscent of the ridiculous “Cones Hotline” that became such an albatross around John Major’s neck.
A so-called popular vote gives plenty of ammunition to the cynics. However, far more dangerous to the interests of working people and their safety at work is the Conservatives’ plan for a “Star Chamber”. If they win the next general election, Kenneth Clarke would be the chair of a new body whose remit would be to enforce a “one in, one out” requirement for new legislation.
Any new law would only be introduced if an “old” one were removed from the statute book, totalling a 5 per cent cut in the “regulatory burden”. If a minister could not find that 5 per cent, they would have to go begging to colleagues in other departments, asking them to find the regulatory savings.
Human behaviourist Professor Richard Thaler would be appointed to advise the Tory Star Chamber. No doubt, he approves of the Conservative approach to legislating, since one of his claims to fame is an analysis of the behaviour of participants on the television game show Deal or No Deal.
The Tory policy paper goes on to draw an artificial distinction between something which it fails to properly define, but which it calls “hard law” – apparently that originating from Brussels, Westminster and the courts – and “soft law”, which appears to be regulations that support or bring into effect the “hard law”. Soft law is a target for the Tories because, they say, it is not subject to the same level of democratic scrutiny as hard law.
It’s not that clear whether the one in, one out rule would apply to hard law or just soft law. But what is apparent – since so much of Regulation in the Post-Bureaucratic Age is devoted to them – is that it would certainly apply to health and safety regulations.
The fight for corporate manslaughter legislation was a long one under this Labour Government. Having sat through the committee stages of the bill, I know it was only accepted by the Tories through firmly gritted teeth. It would never have become law under a Tory administration insistent on the identification of other laws to scrap to make way for it.
This gladiatorial approach would put people in an invidious position. Would the trade union campaign to restore justice to sufferers of pleural plaques be expected to find another group to be victimised instead? Perhaps the Working Time Directive would have to go. David Cameron has previously pledged to repeal it, even though it is a vital health and safety measure that stops people being forced into long and dangerous hours at work and enshrines the right to paid holidays.
Tory ideas about the future of workplace inspections may warm the cockles of an unscrupulous employer’s heart, but will strike fear into those they employ. The problem, according to Regulation in the Post-Bureaucratic Age, is that the cost of inspection is too high. Further, regulated organisations “face periodic and, all too often, inconsistent and intrusive visits from officials checking whether they are complying with each set of regulations”.
It is not obvious on which planet this happens. All the statistical evidence is that, in Britain, the number of workplace safety inspectors and inspections has fallen alarmingly. For most businesses, the likelihood is that they will only be inspected once every 11 years. Yet the Tories would “drastically curb” the powers of Government inspectors – the Health and Safety Executive – by permitting firms to arrange their own, externally audited inspections and, providing they pass, allowing them to refuse entry to official inspectors thereafter.
These external audits would then be filed with the regulator – “like filing annual accounts at Companies House”. With no effective enforcement, this would be an entirely hollow move that would lead to the kind of farcical self-regulation and obsequiousness to the power of the market that allowed the financial industry to bring us all to the point of ruin.
The only enforcement the Tories talk about – “MoT style” inspection reports, quoting precisely which section of which law has been broken – is not designed to prevent workplace accidents. The aim is to curb regulatory “scope creep”, where laws are applied too strictly by “overzealous inspectors”.
The Tories’ gimmicky approach to health and safety and their continuing dedication to “light touch” regulation may get the support of some sections of the business world and those who swallow health and safety myths. But it would put workers’ lives at risk. Trade unionists will point the finger at Cameron if someone dies at work because a health and safety law designed to protect them was repealed by a future Conservative government.
Tom Jones is head of policy and public affairs at Thompsons, the trade union solicitors
