does anyone have any further information on the review of the CDM regs? i am led to believe that a consultation document is to be released shortly.

Peter, I will be interested to see how the concept of ‘copy out’ will actually work against the framework of the Health and Safety at Work Act and whether there will be a legal conflict or confusion with the current CDM structure? It will also be interesting to see how much detail the HSE does put into their Guidance for these new Regulations and whether other interested parties step in to fill the gap left by the absence of an ACOP with their own Code of Practice, or is the concept of ‘copy out’ in reality an opportunity for the concept of Parkinson Law to thrive where we will end up with even more bureaucracy?

Both We've been through all this before with the Heseltine deregulation unit which tried and failed to massively cut UK H&S legislation before what was then Article 118a of the Treaty of Rome (which enabled EC to adopt H&S Directives by qualified majority voting) The ultimate irony is that we could taken a principled stand and implemented directives through HSWA with supporting guidance to require implementation of directives "so far as reasonably practicable" a qualification upheld by European Court of Justice - http://www.bailii.org/eu...s/EUECJ/2007/C12705.html ....but Thatcher and subsequent Governments chose to write yet another code of regulations each time a directive was adopted. Undoing this whilst having the necessary supporting guidance would be a hard challenge. So, instead we're tampering at the edges, so that come October, my employer will need three different systems for reporting and investigating accidents etc in Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland - already the case, but more so in October, with replacement GB regs having a substantially different structure than RIDDOR (NI). So, it's about spin NOT actually reducing bureaucracy.