Proposed amendments to the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill could see considerable changes to the regime for compensation for workplace injury that will make it significantly harder for injured employees to successfully claim compensation.
The proposed changes are seen by many as putting Health & Safety regulation back to Victorian times by considerably diluting the right of an injured employee to claim compensation – a right that has been in place since the early 19th Century.
The change comes in the form of a clause to remove the right to bring civil claims for a breach of a statutory duty contained in certain health and safety legislation. This amendment was introduced on 16 October this year and there has been some criticism that it was put in place with no apparent consultation and at the end of the Commons debate on the Bill as a whole.
In practice, the suggested change removes an automatic right to compensation for an employee who has been injured at work as a result of a breach of Health & Safety regulations by an employer. This right is the result of the way the current regulations impose strict liability on an employer so that where they are found to be in breach of the regulations they are automatically made legally responsible for any damage and loss caused by their acts or omissions. This means that an injured employee will no longer be able to rely on a breach of Health & Safety law by an employer to allow them to claim compensation and will instead have to prove negligence in order to make a successful claim.
The move is part of a series of measures that the government intends to use to help reduce the red tape that they feel employers have to deal with on a regular basis (the Government’s ‘Red Tape Challenge’). Back in 2010 the government promised to check the "growth of compensation culture" by reviewing the country’s health and safety laws, as Lord Young, who was a cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher, and who led the study of the UK’s Health & Safety regulations felt that many of the rules currently in place were “absolute nonsense.” At the time of his statements, several trade unions responded by stating that the “compensation culture” that Lord Young described is a myth and that the rules provide an importance layer of protection.
Statistics from the Health and Safety Executive show the extent of fatalities and injuries sustained in the workplace in the UK. Annual figures for 2011/12 show that 173 workers were killed at work during that time and 111,000 injuries to employees were reported under Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations.
The amendment to the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill has received wide-ranging criticism from bodies such as trade unions, although for a number of employers it could come as something of a relief. The question for many is whether the amendment is likely to result in a huge rise in the cost of litigation, and in the number of cases, as insurers try to avoid making payouts for injuries to employees caused by their employers.