Abstract
This paper explores occupational safety and health regulation in Great Britain following the UK’s exit from the European Union. In particular, the paper focuses on the credibility of regulatory enforcement. The prospects raised by the UK’s exit from the European Union have long been part of a free-market fantasy—even obsession—of right-wing politicians and their ideologues. As the UK’s relationship with the EU is recalibrated, this will present right-wing opportunists with a new rationale for undermining health and safety law and enforcement. The paper uses empirical evidence of Great Britain’s record in health and safety law enforcement to evidence a drift towards an extreme form of self-regulation. It deepens this evidence with a detailed analysis of key international policy debates, arguing that Brexit now raises an imminent threat of the UK entering a ‘race to the bottom’. The paper concludes that the 2021 EU/UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement may enable the UK to evade its formal health and safety responsibilities under the treaty because of the lack of the prospect of significant retaliatory ‘rebalancing’ measures. Should minimal health and safety requirements cease to apply in the post-EU era, then the UK Government will be free to pursue a system of self-regulation that will allow health and safety standards to fall even further behind those of other developed economies.
Highlights
Self-Regulation and Health and Safety Law in BritainThis article approaches the question of workplace safety regulation from an explicitly critical position
As we have shown in previous work, the Better Regulation policy was based upon a set of assumptions that aimed to extend and deepen Robens’ vision of self-regulation [2]
While it is difficult to see how workplace health and safety regulatory standards could fall any further, as we indicated in the introduction to this article, there is very obviously some expectation in government and among Brexit fundamentalists that there will be some kind of deregulatory ‘windfall’ on the cards
Summary
This article approaches the question of workplace safety regulation from an explicitly critical position. According to the Robens philosophy, employers and employees were to co-operatively self-regulate, operating through a variety of formal and informal structures and processes, supported in acting upon their mutual interests by an HSE which would provide advice, encouraging and overseeing compliance [4] Central to this approach, is the use of negotiation and bargaining on the part of regulators to raise, incrementally, general standards of safety management rather than seeking to enforce the meeting of detailed, prescriptive regulations. It analyses the published concerns and the direct requests issued by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations and the UK Government’s responses to those concern and requests The paper uses this analysis to build a comprehensive picture of UK compliance with the expectations of international law, based upon the available statistical evidence and on the documented deliberations and debates in international political and legal fora. It is the implicit claim here that removing credible law enforcement in this context equates with the removal of protections for workers and members of the public— making workplaces more dangerous
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