Must you involve safety representatives?
How much involvement?
If certain members of staff are keen to help you to improve your safety culture, then that’s a positive. However, if they simply want to poke their nose in to cause trouble, that’s a different matter. So if someone is telling you that legislation which covers consultation with employees gives them the right to be involved in accident investigations, it’s worth knowing whether you have to allow them to participate.
Essential tool
The legislation surrounding consultation on health and safety is extraordinarily complex, particularly as all that’s required is for employers to speak to employees. The older legislation on the subject is the Safety Representatives and Safety Committees Regulations 1977 (SRSCR) which are still in force today. They concern the rights and functions of union-appointed safety representatives.
It wasn’t until 1996 that legislation imposed a duty to consult within non-unionised workforces. The Health and Safety (Consultation with Employees) Regulations 1996 (HSCER) almost balanced the scales to give non-unionised workers the same benefits as their unionised counterparts. However, there are some differences with the result that there are reduced rights for “representatives of employee safety”, i.e. those elected by their colleagues under HSCER , in comparison with union-appointed “safety representatives”.
By the book
To help employers with the differing regulations it was proposed that the legislation should be merged. But agreement could not be reached and instead official guidance was published in 2008: Consulting workers on health and safety (reference L146 ). A second edition was published in 2012 which was then further amended in 2014 (see The next step ).
What’s changed?
The amendments to the 2012 version, published in October 2014, are minor. These include updating references to other legislation together with guidance and changes to improve readability. There’s only one change of any significance and that affects Regulation 6(1) of the SRSCR .
Under this Regulation you must allow safety representatives to conduct an investigation of events which are reportable under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013 (RIDDOR). The text now also makes clear that the same rights apply in respect of recordable “over-three day” accidents under RIDDOR .
Tip 1. If your member of staff is not an appointed safety representative, you don’t have to allow them to be involved.
Tip 2. You may wish to consider input from certain members of staff if you believe that it may help you to find out exactly what happened and will be seen in a positive light by the rest of your staff, i.e. they won’t think that you’re trying to hide anything from them.
For a copy of L146, visit http://tipsandadvice-healthandsafety.co.uk/download (HS 13.10.06).
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