Thanks Kaza - welcome and contribute/pester away.

I think in simple terms this amendment is aimed at catching the zero hours contracts employers who repeatedly argue they are not employers.

In practice the amended Regulations have probably been largely overtaken by legal judgments which these employers keep losing (though some law firms have done very nicely).

That is true enough, Chris, but there are two ways of achieving this when it comes to PPE.

1. "Here's your PPE which we've provided for you free of charge."

2. "You haven't brought your PPE and you're not going to work for us without it, so go home and don't get paid."

Chris

I am NOT an advocate of deregulation of health and safety BUT we could use Brexit as an excuse to get rid of almost all health and safety regulations in the UK.

Most are only there as successive UK Governments decided that the easiest way to transpose EC Directives without "gold plating" the requirements was by writing regulations so as to "copy out" requirements of the Directives.

But as you point out it's generally all there in the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 as implemented in GB and by a legal nicety in Northern Ireland [noting also that the Republic of Ireland then also enacted virtually identical legislation, though putting Safety before Health in line with the mainland European norm].

So, we take HSWA - Section 2(1) of the Act sets out the general duty of an employer towards their employee(s), and Section 3(1) the duty of an employer to others in essentially the same words. The only real difference is that Section 2 also has a Section 2(2) in five parts which provides examples of the general duty under Section 2(1).

By inference you could apply exactly the same examples to Section 3(1).

It would be quite easy to back up Sections 2(1) and 3(1) with an Approved Code of Practice telling employers that they have to provide their workers [of whatever employment status] with suitable PPE + all the adminstrative things that go with it - training etc.

None of this actually required Brexit but it might be sold as a "benefit" of going it alone. Complete nonsense, but every Govt likes good spin.

One of the downsides of the copy out approach [in my opinion] was that it led to multiple statutory requirements for risk assessments when none was needed. How could a duty holder possibly convince themselves or anyone else [including the regulator] that they had done all that was reasonably practicable to remove or mitigate the risks arising from the conduct of their business without doing a risk assessment?

Nobody suddenly invented the concept of risk assessment merely because it was in the requirements of successive EU Directives, transposed via COSHH 1988, Noise at Work Regulations 1989, Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1992 amongst other codes of regulations - all driven by the generally consistent wording within Directives.

Instead doing risk assessment was a natural output of a legislative regime in which prescriptive and proscriptive measures were being progressively ditched in favour of the goal setting requirements of HSWA, whilst at the same time maintaining the standards demanded by prior legislation as required by Section 1(2) of HSWA.

So we kept the benefits of those DOs and DON'Ts whilst also plugging all the gaps. Even allowed for risks to be controlled by application of the "precautionary principle" BEFORE people started getting injured or ill as a result of the introduction of new technology, materials etc.

Thence as example, standards were set to control exposure to Man Made Mineral Fibres BEFORE people had died from long term lung diseases as a result of exposure to MMMFs.

Hi Kate

I confess that my memory is hazy on this.

However, I do remember finding myself accompanying the Minister responsible for health and safety at work on a factory visit to look at noise issues.

Just at the time when there was lots of debate about the first EC Directive on noise at work and employers and worker representatives were arguing about where the thesholds should be set as to the "First Action Level" and the "Second Action Level". 

There was also going to be a "Peak Action Level" but its threshold seemed less controversial.

So, at the end of the visit there was a wash up session and the employer was arguing for a higher "First Action Level" - when I was asked to comment I pointed out that there were very few parts of this particular operation where the measures taken didn't already mean that exposure was below the First Action Level being proposed (and eventually adopted) - 8 hour time weighted exposure aka LEP,d of 85dB(A). 

[Note - that First Action Level has, of course, since been reduced]

So, whatever the position with the origins of COSHH, EC influence on requiring formal risk assessments predated the "Framework Directive" adopted in 1989.

Thanks AK - so the original Chemicals, Physical and Biological Agents Directive dating back to 1980.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:31980L1107&from=EN

Interesting that the Directive specifically uses the words "reasonably practicable" showing how much the UK was influencing what was happening across the EU before starting to push back at "excessive regulation" where the UK had to accept the Display Screen Equipment Directive kicking and fighting but as a minority in a Directive adopted via "Qualified Majority Voting" 

Agreed that leaving all these regulations intact does no harm if employers etc treat them as a group and usually consider the risks as a package.

However, sweeping them away should not really result in a level playing field at the bottom UNLESS Section 1(2) of HSWA were to be repealed. To save some looking it up it's the bit in the Act which envisaged prior legislation being progressive replaced but so as to maintain or improve on the standards previously achieved.