Understanding Your Responsibilities
What the law expects of a duty holder, how criminal and civil law differ, how enforcement works, and what a health and safety management system looks like.
Pages in this chapter (1 of 4)
4.1 What the Law Requires
You know that as a duty holder you have health and safety responsibilities. The question is how far they go and what guides you. The minimum is to comply with the law, because the law sets the boundaries within which organisations work. As you have seen, there are also many business benefits in managing safely.
Depending on national or local law, a duty holder may have to assess reasonably foreseeable risks and put controls in place to reduce them so far as is reasonably practicable. The UK has this requirement. Two ideas matter here.
Reasonable foreseeability
Being responsible for everything that could be foreseen would be an impossible burden. So the law asks you to deal only with risks that are reasonably foreseeable. If you see a cable trailing across a doorway, you know that someone is likely to trip over it. An employer is not responsible for a risk that it can successfully argue was not reasonably foreseeable, but is responsible when foreseeability can be argued.
Three tests help:
- Common knowledge. You are expected to foresee what an average person would foresee. If the public knows that working on a roof in a gale with nothing to stop a fall is dangerous, so should the employer.
- Industry knowledge. If the issue goes beyond public knowledge, you are expected to know what other companies in your industry know. A company that used a chemical without knowing its danger, when the rest of the industry had known for years and had replaced it or controlled it, could not argue that the risk was not foreseeable.
- Expert knowledge. Only an expert is expected to have expert knowledge. A research chemist would reasonably be expected to know the properties of the substances being handled, including odd risks in unusual circumstances.
An employer must be able to show foreseeability of significant risks under tests one and two, and would rarely be held to test three unless it is an expert.
Reasonable practicability
This was covered in Module 3. If the cost in time, effort, money or inconvenience of a control is far greater than the benefit of the risk reduction, then it is not reasonably practicable to use it.
A study aid, not published or endorsed by IOSH or OSHA. Laws and limits differ between countries.