Hi all I'm trying to work out exactly what these costs are for small business to comply with H&S as stated by our good friend lord young. Is he referring to the costs of things like maintaining equipment, ensuring staff are trained or the cost of suitable PPE? Is he saying that small businesses should not have to do these things? . What if the small business was involved in working at height, removing asbestos, using machinery or employed shift workers? As far as I'm aware it costs nothing to do a risk assessment if it's done in house and depending on the task can take as little as 10min to complete There is plenty of free guidance on the HSE website for small business. I have my own small business ( not H&S) that I do part time and although I have the luxury of a H&S background, H&S takes up very little of my time and costs nothing

For a balanced view, see: http://www.iosh.co.uk/ne...cb8e4e389&version=-1

There seems to be a view that Lord Young is going to remove the H&S legislation that applies to all employers and self employed people especially as it applies to the small and medium sized employers. That would result in claims of an unfair playing field by the bigger employers and even worse the small and medium sized compan ies becoming less safe for thier employees. This will be crazy as the bigger companies would simply start up smaller ones to do the more risky aspects of any job as contractors. There may well be some scope for simplifing some of the current legislation and that is where he should concentrate his review not the exemption of some part of industry from the law!

There exists an assumption that the Young enquiry is to improve health and safety practice in some way. A more realistic assumption is that it is to enable the removal of health and safety practice in large areas of industry. In SMEs it would have minimal effect since they are much more likely to have minimal H&S practices anyway. Make no mistake, the enquiry is to minimise the cost of H&S. If the way to do that is to exempt companies with "X" amount of employees [or under] from large areas of legislation then that is what will be done. Along with that goes the removal, by whatever means, of an employees right to litigate for compensation. No matter what the IOSH thinks should be done, Lord Young has a history of radical actions and will, in all possibility, pay no attention to those whose concern is for peoples welfare. Plans to set up an independent body to accredit consultants (IOSH) will inevitably (but not to IOSH and Co) be compared to the CSCS scheme....Money For Old Rope. But then, I tend to the pessimistic attitude where .Gov is concerned. And I remember Lord Young (as now) from when he was David Young.

Jay is right about EU Directives. The UK must comply with them or it will be fined etc. If they want to opt they could try to negotiate a deal but not countries with trade agreements with the EU like Norway and Switzerland still have to comply with these directives even though they are not member states. So it would seem that the only option would be complete withdrawal from the Union. (Not something the Lib-Dem part of the coalition would be willing to accept). I suspect the whole exercise will be involve a lot of hand waving and some window dressing but not much substance. The main target will probably be independent H&S consultants and the 'no win no fee' lawyers- a system incidentally introduced by the Conservatives in the 80's to save money on Legal Aid. Who was a Minister in Government at that time? Why a certain Lord Young.

Excellent idea .......