The nanny state or good business practice?

Daily Mail readers will certainly be familiar with the idea that in the UK we live in a nanny state where there are ridiculous levels of health and safety red tape that business owners must comply with. Fire regulations for buildings and businesses, first aid requirements, safe working condition regulations, personal protective equipment legislation, hazardous substances legislation and so on ad infinitum. It can seem like an absolute minefield of complex rules and regulations that as a business owner you ignore at your peril, but is this necessarily the case? There are very few business owners who don’t feel an implicit duty of care to their staff, and generally those who don’t, don’t stay in business for very long. The penalties for not looking after staff and employees are severe up to and including jail time for more serious offences, but is health and safety the nightmare that it can at first appear?

In broad terms I think the answer to this is a resounding and emphatic no! I guess that having made such a bold statement I need to back it up, so here goes. The vast majority of health and safety is a combination of common sense and good basic business practice. It relates to making sure that the workplace environment is safe for people to move about, and carry out their tasks in. Things like tidying up to avoid trip hazards, wearing the correct safety equipment when using dangerous equipment, making sure that potentially dangerous machinery is properly guarded and so on are just common sense. Why would any business not follow these principles? The fact that an inspector can call round at any time shouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference if you are keeping on top of day to day chores.

The same principle applies to fire safety and first aid. If your staff don’t know what to do in the event of fire then you should be asking yourself why not! If you don’t have anyone on staff who can give emergency first aid you already know that you should. It isn’t a difficult process to take a first aid course. St John Ambulance will sort you out very reasonably with very little effort on your part. You may ask why you should do this when you have never had a fire or a requirement for first aid, but these are the same questions you could ask about insurance, and most business owners wouldn’t think about not being insured, the risks are simply too great.

The other excuse I hear is that it is too expensive, but to my mind this is absolute nonsense. Most businesses can comply with health and safety requirements with very little input from expensive consultants. Talk to your staff, ask them what concerns them in the workplace. Look around yourself. If you are sharp enough to run a business you should be easily sharp enough to spot potential risks and do something about them. Above all, whatever measures you have to take I can guarantee that they will be a heck of a lot cheaper than a lawsuit for negligence of worse still corporate manslaughter! So to any business owner out there with a mindset that health and safety is the nanny state gone mad I would say just one thing. Imagine that rather than a staff member it was a family member who was at risk in your business…..I’m pretty sure you’d do something about the risk then, and that is how you should be thinking about your staff….Just a thought….