Cameron pledges New Year attack on health and safety "albatross"

Health & Safety update 06/01/2012

David Cameron has announced plans to carry out stringent cutbacks to the UK's health and safety "monster".

The Prime Minister told a gathering of small business owners and entrepreneurs at Intuit UK in Maidenhead that the bureaucracy around health and safety rules had a "stranglehold" on smaller businesses and he was keen to eliminate it.

Among the proposed changes will be amendment to the health and safety law on strict liability for civil claims, so that businesses will no longer automatically be at fault if something goes wrong. There will also be changes made to insurance provision - through work with the UK's insurance companies - that will ensure that companies are not forced to go far beyond what is required by law to secure insurance.

"I am determined that we do everything possible to take the brakes off business: cutting taxes; slashing red tape; putting billions into big infrastructure projects; making it much easier for British firms to get out there and trade with the world," Cameron told the meeting.

"And there is something else we are doing: waging war against the excessive health and safety culture that has become an albatross around the neck of British businesses."

He said that bureaucracy cuts would be the coalition's "clear New Year's resolution" for 2012, specifying it as the year that "we get a lot of this pointless time-wasting out of the British economy and British life once and for all."

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