The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has announced details of its proposals to simplify the mandatory reporting of workplace injuries, which are due to be introduced in October.
The changes are in response to recommendation made in the Löfstedt Review, published November 2011, that the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1995 (RIDDOR) be amended to reduce the amount of health and safety red tape faced by businesses.
But Vaughan Burnand, chair of the CIOB’s health and safety committee, has pointed out that the changes will impact on construction’s ability to make valid year-on-year comparisons, while offering relatively slight improvements on cost and bureaucracy.
The changes have been devised to reduce the number of incidents UK businesses have to report and so save a total of £5.9 m over 10 years and are still subject to parliamentary approval.
"Like the move from a three to a seven-day injury reporting requirement [in April 2012], it could make the industry appear safer without us actually having done anything to improve safety."
Vaughan Burnand, chair of the CIOB’s health and safety committee
The previous classification of “major injuries” to workers will be replaced with a shorter list of “specified injuries”. The existing schedule of 47 types of industrial disease will be replaced with eight categories of reportable work-related illness, and fewer types of “dangerous occurrence” will require reporting.
However, the reporting requirements for fatal accidents, accidents involving members of the public and accidents that leave a worker unable to attend work for more than seven days will remain largely the same.
Likewise, there will be no changes to current methods of reporting an incident or the criteria determining whether an incident should be investigated.
But simplifying reporting for firms could have a detrimental effect on the industry’s health and safety performance, said Burnand. “The purpose of RIDDOR reporting is to allow HSE to analyse data and inform future action, regulation and litigation. The new system will change the basic meaning of the data, that is to say, we will be at year zero and comparison to figures from previous years will be flawed to some degree.
“And like the move from a three to a seven-day injury reporting requirement [in April 2012], it could make the industry appear safer without us actually having done anything to improve safety,” he said.
Meanwhile, he suggested that the targeted savings of £5.9m over 10 years – and covering all reporting industries, not just construction – are unlikely to have a major impact.
“This figure is a bit pathetic, with [construction] volumes at £80bn a year that would mean a £5.9m saving on a turnover of £80bn, which equals just 0.0007375%.”
The HSE has published information on the RIDDOR changes on its website here
