It has been announced that Professor Ragnar Löfstedt has been asked by employment minister Chris Grayling to prepare a follow-up "mini-report" to his "Reclaiming Health and Safety for All" review from last November.
The report will to determine how satisfied Löfstedt is with the way the Government is implementing his 26 recommendations, and is expected to be published by the end of January 2013. His suggestions from last year were almost unanimously accepted by Grayling, and included exempting some self-employed people from compliance with safety law, a review of core safety legislation to see if some common requirements can be consolidated and a simplification of the Health and Safety Executive's (HSE) 53 approved codes of practice.
The original team of researchers at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) who helped with the initial review will reassemble later in the year to evaluate progress on the recommendations. The result will be a 10-page summary, which will eventually be made publicly available.
The first report suggested varying deadlines for proposed changes, such as April 2013 for the HSE to review the Work at Height Regulations SI 2005/735 and April 2015 to examine legislation limited to particular industrial sectors such as construction, to see if there is scope for consolidating them. However, these timescales have been shortened by the Prime Minister who has asked for most of the recommendations to be implemented by the end of year.
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