Does anyone know when Step Riding ( Riding on the rear of a Dust Cart/ RCV) became Illegal in the UK and under what legislation the change in working practices took place?

It is not illegal; but people will not take the leap and justify it in their R-Assessments etc. Its probably a case of timing etc as if a round is completed on time etc without it why use it/why is it needed?

To add to my previous response, it's worth adding that in the early 1980s the relevant HSE NIG (National Industry Group or National Interest Group) was also active in pressing RCV operators to phase out RCVs with dangerous compacting mechanisms designs. Also the NIG almost certainly pressed local authorities and other waste collectors to buy RCVs with hold-to-run 'dead-man' controls for the refuse compaction mechanism cycles. These initiatives by the NIG would have been of little or no interest to journalists and the general public but undoubtedly made a difference to the numbers of RCV crew members who were seriously injured or killed during their work. In about 1985 I attended a serious incident in which a council employee's arm had been trapped at the back of a RCV by the sweeper plate or paddle which rotated around a horizontal axis and pushed refuse from the rear receiving hopper to inside the RCV's big enclosed chamber. The RCV was a 'Scarpa Garwood' of American design. As older forum users with experience of such RCVs might recall, there was very little clearance between the long horizontal edge of the paddle and the inside of the waste receiving hopper. Furthermore, the paddle movement was initiated by one press of a button and had no reverse facility. Though fire fighters were present with vehicle cutting equipment, they had no success in their efforts to cut or dismantle the RCV mechanism to release the employee. Therefore, there was no alternative except for medics to anaesthetise the man and amputate his arm at the scene. The arm had already been badly crushed by the mechanism and would probably have needed amputating later if the man could have been released otherwise from the RCV. If the blatantly dangerous RCV mechanism had been part of a machine in a factory it would have been the subject of an immediate prohibition notice. However, refuse collection was still relatively new to HSE as a work activity (a "new entrant" under the 1974 Act) and being dealt with throughout the UK via pressure from the NIG as described above. It's quite possible that some safety advisers with local authorities, etc liaised with the NIG and helped to push for safer designs of RCVs. No apologies for the above digression from the main topic. Mention of American design RCVs prompts a question: It seems that some American films with street settings in New York feature refuse collections using RCVs with crews on back steps and side steps. Can any forum users who have been to New York and or other parts of the USA in recent years comment as to whether or not RCVs in the USA still have back and side steps? If they don't, perhaps film makers commission the appearance of old RCVs to make their films seem more authentically American, perhaps a bit like having red phone boxes in UK film settings. Another possibility is that the American films on which I've based my impression are quite old now.