Since it came to power in 2010, the Conservative-led coalition government has issued a series of disparaging statements about health and safety. For instance, back in 2012 David Cameron bemoaned the ‘excessive health and safety culture that has become an albatross around the neck of British businesses’ and vowed to tackle the ‘health and safety monster’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16424844). While just this month, Justice Secretary Chris Grayling pledged to ‘slay health and safety culture’ through the new Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Bill (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/10978488/Chris-Grayling-vows-to-slay-health-and-safety-culture.html).

Considering HSE (Health and Safety Executive, the UK’s health and safety regulator) is itself part of government, such negative comments appear counter-intuitive, an example of government shooting itself in the foot. However, the somewhat unusual status of HSE may go some way to explaining this apparent anomaly. Indeed, as an executive non-departmental public body, HSE lies at arm’s length from central government. It is this critical distance that makes HSE’s relationship with the Department for Work and Pensions, under whose ministerial responsibility it falls, a potential battleground and explains why central government feels politically capable of talking so critically of the area it regulates.

This distance is perhaps also the source of central government’s suspicion of HSE and the driving force of the many reviews it has endured over the years. Notably, in the early 1990s under the Major government, it was subject to several reviews which called its very existence into question, prompting John Rimington, then Director General of the HSE, to label them ‘firestorms’ (https://sm.britsafe.org/john-rimington-interview-enduring-firestorm). Given government’s desire for centralised influence and control, one question reviews often seek to answer is whether HSE, an operationally independent body, is the most appropriate regulation delivery system.

That said, HSE is arguably only notionally operationally independent, as central government consistently seeks to take the lead. The government’s 2011 ‘Good Health and Safety, Good for Everyone’ policy document, setting out as it did major reforms to Britain’s health and safety system, is one such example of central government seeking to exert control (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/good-health-and-safety-good-for-everyone).