This week marks the 50^th anniversary of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 gaining Royal Assent. Becky Spencer evaluates its impact.

1974, the year of the Three-Day week, two General Elections, England and Wales failing to qualify for the World Cup (Scotland went out in the group stage), and the year arguably the most important piece of workplace safety legislation – the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act – came into force.

Described in Parliament at the time by then MP for Leicester West, Greville Janner, as “a potentially well-muscled weapon which can destroy at least some of the unnecessary suffering caused in industry”, the Act received Royal Assent on July 31, 1974 - just eight weeks after the Flixborough disaster, when an explosion at the Nypro (UK) chemical plant in North Lincolnshire killed 28 workers and seriously injured 36.

What changed?

Based on recommendations made in the 1972 Robens Report, the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act (HSWA) marked a move away from traditional detailed and prescriptive industry regulations which had been overseen by Her Majesty’s Factory Inspectorate until the 1970s, to a goal-based non-prescriptive regulatory framework, whereby regulations express goals and principles, and are supported by codes of practice and guidance.

The Act extended protection to all persons who work – employees and the self-employed – as well as to workplaces that had not previously been protected by safety legislation such as hospitals, schools and local government. It also, for the first time, covered members of the public where they may be affected by the activities of people at work.

The newly-established Health and Safety Executive (HSE) was given responsibility for enforcing the Act alongside local authorities, and new enforcement powers enabled workplace inspectors to issue improvement and prohibition notices so employers had the chance to correct health and safety issues before facing legal action. Following its first year as regulator, HSE said: “the power to issue notices has enabled it to deal effectively with many situations where previously no satisfactory procedure existed for protecting works people and others”.

By April 1975 all parts of the Act were in force. But it wasn’t all plain sailing.  Two of the main concerns at the time, which both are as relevant today as they were then, were the lack of resources available to HSE to enforce the Act, particularly in relation to the number of inspectors available to visit workplaces, and a lack of awareness of the Act – and the protections and responsibilities under it – by employers, employees and the general public.

Greville Janner MP raised both issues with the Government of the day, expressing concern that the lack of inspectors meant the average workplace may be visited only once in four years. “Once in every four years is not enough to visit even the best-regulated workplaces so as to keep management on its toes,” he told Parliament. It makes you wonder what he would think of the limited number of workplace inspections that HSE’s resources allow today. Some estimates suggest, on average, a workplace is visited by an HSE inspector every 14 years!

Then and now

But, of course, work and workplaces are very different today than in 1974; they are certainly safer thanks to the introduction of the Health and Safety at Work Act and the secondary legislation that flowed from it. HSE research suggests that the number of employees fatally injured at work has fallen by around 85 per cent since HSWA came into force.

In 1974 there were approximately 651 fatal injuries to employees, which compares to 138 workers (employees and self-employed) killed in work-related accidents in 2023/24. As for non-fatal injuries, in 1974 HSE estimates there were around 336,700 reported. This compares to 60,645 non-fatal injuries reported under RIDDOR in 2022/23. Both of these non-fatal injury figures are just the tip of the iceberg because in 1974 and 2024 non-fatal were/are significantly under-reported. Some things never change!
 
One thing that has changed enormously is industry and the type of work people do. There has been a massive shift away from manufacturing and other heavy industry to lower risk service industries.

The year HSWA came into force, 73 per cent of 16–64-year-olds were in employment. The manufacturing sector accounted for around a quarter of the UK’s economic output, employing around 7.3 million workers. In 1974, 257 manufacturing sector employees were fatally injured at work. Comparing this to 2024, the manufacturing sector is much smaller, accounting for around 9 per cent of total UK economic output and employing around 2.7 million people.

In 2023/24, 16 manufacturing workers were killed in accidents at work.

Then as now, workers in the construction industry had one of the highest risks of being killed or injured at work. In 1974, 166 construction workers were killed at work. In 2023/24, 51 of the 138 workers fatally injured at work were construction workers. In 1977, HSE’s first Director General John Locke said: “In construction… the same basic causes have produced a high proportion of accidents in the past 60 to 70 years: most of these accidents happen to people engaged in routine site activities which simply have not received sufficient forethought and care.” Sound familiar?

One terrible legacy of the UK’s industrial heritage is the number of people who worked in the construction industry in the 1970s who have since been diagnosed with asbestos-related diseases and cancers. There are around 12,000 deaths each year from occupational lung disease and cancer estimated to have been caused by past exposure to chemicals and dust at work. More than half of these deaths were caused by past exposure to asbestos.

Although asbestos was listed as a major area of policy work for the newly-formed Health and Safety Commission (HSC) in its first annual report after HSWA came into force, asbestos was not fully banned in the UK until 1999 and its presence in many buildings is still a danger to tradespeople and others today.

Other major areas of policy work listed in HSC’s first annual report (covering 1974-76) included dust at work, fire precautions and the safeguarding of machinery.

The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 laid the foundations for a new way of looking at safety and health through the lens of 'risk', requiring risk creators (employers), risk takers (workers) and risk regulators (principally the HSE) to get together to assess risks and come up with workable solutions to control them.

“This Act will not put an end to death and injury at work,” Greville Janner MP told Parliament in 1974. “What it will do is to cut accidents and to enable the most stringent penalties to be imposed upon those who do not comply with their duties.” It can certainly be argued that it has done just that.