Where health and safety has gone beyond reasonable

Sep 18 2003 By Peter Jackson, The Journal

The TUC's new leader Brendan Barber set the tone of the Brighton conference in a speech accusing the Government of being too sympathetic to employers.

He said: "The Government has still failed to deliver all the fairness at work we demand and is still too ready to believe employers bleating about so-called red tape."

As one who has done quite a bit of bleating in his time about red tape - so-called or otherwise - I have to say that caused me a twinge of irritation.

And that irritation turned to downright annoyance when, within days of this speech, I read the story about the Morpeth company Abbey Well, which supplies bottled spring water and whose future is threatened by new Government proposals.

Under the Government's Water Bill, currently going through Parliament, companies such as Abbey Well will only be granted extraction licences for 12-year periods. This, claims the company, which currently has an unlimited licence, will prevent it raising investment capital.

Abbey Well employs 100 people and plans major expansion. Its main competitors in France and Scotland face no such limited licences and, if these plans go ahead they will, say the company, threaten both expansion plans and existing jobs.

We also have a new Nat- West survey, which says sole traders are spending 41pc more time dealing with Government regulations than they did three years ago, and more than half of the 851 SMEs surveyed said the burden of regulation had made them reduce their workforce.

Mr Barber could still, no doubt, dismiss this as `bleating'. After all, Abbey Well might be exaggerating, and NatWest … well, it's a bank innit?

But what about Cancer Research UK, which claimed last week that Brussels and Whitehall red tape is stifling research into anti-cancer drugs and, according to the charity's Professor Malcolm Stevens, `is undoubtedly costing lives'.

According to the charity, over the past 10 years, the number of regulations on research has increased 40-fold, charities face much larger administration costs and it takes more than five times as long to progress new drugs into patient trials.

A lot of regulation is imposed in the name of health and safety. Nobody wants to see employees exposed to unreasonable risk and it is right their employers should be made to take reasonable precautions. But in industry now, the health and safety mania has gone beyond the reasonable. Mr Barber is entitled to make those arguments - it's his job to do so. But it is also his job to protect his members' jobs.