E-Books: A Quick Guide to Health and Safety

A Quick Guide to Health and Safety by R Gilbert. Health and safety issues now impose upon almost every part of business life. The system of enforcement is managed and implemented in the UK by The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) but at times it can be difficult to know exactly which bits of this elaborate spider’s web should be applied in a given instance, and which are most important. This Quick Guide puts the subject into context, providing a rational overview and a valid starting point to applying health and safety in the workplace, and offering a concise and readily accessible interpretation of what health and safety legislation means in practice. This Quick Guide to Health and Safety is not a statement of the law or even a uniquely valid interpretation. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of shelf-bending tomes covering H&S subjects in the most myopic of detail.

Attention all employers, employees, managers, and business owners, Health and Safety (H&S) is here to stay. I suspect you knew that already in recent years the culture of H&S seems to have grown upwards and outwards, to the point where it now seems to impose upon almost every part of business life. I have spent a lot of my career dealing with H&S issues and somewhere, buried deep under the misinformation and padding, lies the well-meaning commonsense core of the subject – the duty of care to people, like you and me, in their working environment.
Sitting at the top of the tree lies the system of enforcement, managed and implemented in the UK by The Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Together with their associated agencies and companies, the HSE publishes numerous booklets,
leaflets, and documents, paid for by you, the taxpayer.
These undoubtedly high-quality publications come complete with colour photographs and simplified abbreviations of the many sets of regulations that cover H&S aspects relating to factories, offices, buildings, construction sites, and all other workplaces, in their entirety. Each document contains multiple cross-references to bits of itself, other documents, and so on, ad infinitum.

You are not alone if you find this suite of documents and their cross-references confusing. You might be forgiven for concluding that they are more network than route maps, and at times it can be difficult to know exactly which bits of this elaborate spider’s web apply to you, and, of those that do, exactly which are most important.