Is workplace health safe in 2026?

Perhaps unnoticed by many, the government has announced a review of the regulation of health and safety. It is not being initiated by HSE, nor by its parent department, the Department for Work and Pensions. The review, whose terms of reference are still being wrangled over, is part of the government’s drive for growth.

Already HSE’s engagement and policy division is focused on this agenda, perhaps to the exclusion of many other things that might be contributing to the 1.9 million people made ill from work. You cannot fault them for this. The very existence of HSE could be on the line. 

Meanwhile, just before Christmas, the Office for Nuclear Regulation put out their new strategy for consultation, with a deadline of January 9th. The strategy for the regulator of the most toxic substances on the planet mentions safety only five times and health only once. The strategy is clearly written around the concept of accepting the safety undertakings of potential overseas exporters of nuclear reactors. It also directly seeks to address criticisms in the Fingleton review of the regulator being too risk averse.

The review takes particular aim at the ALARP (as low as reasonably practicable) principle, suggesting that the concept, developed to balance the risk of harm to health with the cost, had become too weighted in favour of protecting human health, against the economic benefits of taking “proportionate” risks. This, itself, reflects a dislike in current public policy circles of taking precautionary approaches. 

Kevin Bampton: "The insidious compromises that undermine our health and safety infrastructure need to be called out and addressed."

Precautionary principle weakened 

A framework Act to give the government powers previously held by the European Commission was passed last year. The Product Safety and Metrology Act was an archetype of the ‘Brexit bonus’ of being able to regulate our own border. The framework Act empowers the government to make regulations to protect the health of the population from defective products.

Despite efforts by health and safety organisations, MPs and the Lords, the government refused to include the power (not obligation) of the government to invoke the precautionary principle in the restriction of imports which may be harmful to human health.

The precautionary principle has long been used to enable decisions to be made by regulators where there is insufficient direct evidence of how and how much a product can harm health, but there is a hazard and the risk it poses could be significant. 

We maintain the precautionary principle in environmental policy, having accidentally erased it from the statute book during Brexit. Consequently, I am more likely to get protection from a hazardous product if I am a squirrel than if I am a human.

Hazardous substances have been, by and large, the subject of reasonably good control in the UK. Two helpful tools for employers have been the Workplace Exposure Limits (WELs) and HSE’s legendary COSHH essentials. However, EH40, the list of WELs set out 20 years ago, was last amended five years ago and stands out of line with the latest findings of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, for example.

We have not updated WELs for substances like formaldehyde, which we delayed because of the challenge to our funeral industry complying. As it stands, our WELs are less and less reliable standards for COSHH assessments.

The other tool was in the COSHH essentials area. This really helpful walk-through material has disappeared from HSE’s website, alongside 64,000 pages of other guidance. Indeed, HSE guidance seems to be thought part of the problem of over-regulation.

The Mayfield review of health in the workplace aims to replace HSE and other guidance with employer-led and employer-validated standards which are not designed to align with national policies or regulatory aspirations, but the appetite of businesses involved in setting them.

Faced with these juggernauts of deregulation, we find ourselves encountering early symptoms of the cost to the UK economy. Tuberculosis is shutting down workplaces and breaking out in communities. We have asbestos in play sand and in the imported brakes of cars and elevators. Silicosis, a disease of the 20th century, is resulting in young men requiring lung transplants or sending them to a premature grave. Young women are dying of asbestos exposure occurring in school or hospital environments.

Workplace health disputes

Aspirations have been signalled that the new Fair Work Agency, built from the components of the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, will shoulder the burden of dealing with workplace health disputes. As the thousands of slaves in the UK, working in car washes and nail bars, cannabis farms and brothels might attest, if they had a voice, that Agency was scarcely equipped to deliver on its initial mandate, let alone adjudicate on thousands of worker claims of unfair treatment relating to health at work. 

Our tunnel vision in how we address energy conservation is failing to design in lessons learned through the tragedies of the past. Hospital patients and workers are enduring burgeoning respiratory diseases, because of poor ventilation that would make Florence Nightingale weep. Building regulations set water temperatures to levels that invite legionella outbreaks. We import EV batteries with unknown chemical composition, making it impossible to safely recycle them.

Our vision for the workplace is to send more people who suffer from ill-health into it, but to sever the links that individuals and companies have with GPs and occupational health professionals respectively. We are inviting people to work with more risks, while reducing the guidance, support and standards required of employers to prevent harmful workplace exposures.

This will certainly give a short-term bump to the national benefits bill. Compelling the sick to work will achieve more labour in the market. The wellbeing industry will thrive. However, wellbeing is a subjective feeling of a worker, rather than the objective question about whether they are actually clinically well. Hairdressers in Norway score some of the highest scores for wellbeing, but their health profiles do not match it because of the range of chemical and musculoskeletal exposures at work.

And the end result? We will make another short-term loan, secured against the health of the workforce. The country will have more broken people, and more with shorter productive lives. 

Our benefits bill will grow, the health service will be even more overloaded, our tax take will shrink and our productivity will sag.

Prevention brings business benefits

Preventing work-related ill-health by stopping the workplace being a place that causes people not to work or not to work effectively is not a liability to business, but an investment in business. BOHS recently estimated that ill health imposes an additional 15 per cent on construction firms’ labour costs. Because the person who may become ill can be any member of the team, the likely impact in delays to delivery is hard to estimate, but with 15 per cent less available labour, things are not going to be delivered on time. 

For some occupations in the construction sector, the average age when a person ceases to be able to be economically active is 46. Imagine the skills lost and all the investment in that individual’s training, against the backdrop of a tight labour market for skilled construction workers. And in construction, delay means financial penalties and loss of profit. By designing out the things that make people ill, we are designing in efficiency, quality and profitability.

From a government policy point of view, this results in more growth, more productivity and a greater tax take. It reduces the cost of benefits, the cost to the NHS and the broader social cost. 

The previous government, in a political quest to rid us of any taint of Europe, came very close to dismantling the infrastructure that protects business from a race to the bottom in health and safety. This government seems set to deliver a fatal blow to health and safety with the view that any job is better than a healthy job. 

We all need to be vigilant and vocal as the insidious compromises that undermine our health and safety infrastructure need to be called out and addressed, lest we wake up and find ourselves in a country where a healthy and safe workplace is the prerogative of the benevolent employer and a perk, not a reasonable expectation.

For more information see:
bohs.org

Kevin Bampton is Chief executive officer of BOHS