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The Government will legislate to specify that day-to-day health and safety management will be the responsibility of managers, leaving directors free to focus on governance and strategic oversight.
The change was sought by the Institute of Directors following the conviction earlier this year of the former Chief Executive of Ports of Auckland for failing to exercise his due diligence obligations under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015.
See Chapman Tripp’s commentaries here and here.
The announcement was one of four by Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden this week. The other three were:
- specifying that compliance by a business with an Approved Code of Practice (APOC) will be sufficient to meet that business's health and safety (H&S) obligations
- a proposed amendment to clarify that landowners will not be responsible if someone is injured on their land while doing recreational activities, and
- a “suite of system-wide changes” to cut through “unnecessary red tape”.
These will include a “carve-out” for small, low-risk businesses from the Act’s requirements with the effect that they “will only have to manage critical risks and provide basic facilities to ensure worker welfare”.
The example the Minister supplied for what this might look like in action was that a small clothing shop would “still need to provide first aid, emergency plans, and basic facilities, such as suitable lighting, but wouldn’t need to have a psychosocial harm policy in place”.
ACOPs will create a safe harbour from other H&S regulations. An ACOP will typically cover a sector or an industry. They can now be created only by WorkSafe but the Government will extend this ability to private sector organisations, although the Minister will need to approve each ACOP against a set of prescribed standards.
Other proposed reforms the Cabinet has signed off on are:
- sharpening the primary purpose of the Act to focus on critical risk with the aim of reducing “reduce tick-box health and safety activities that do not protect workers from harm”
- clarifying the boundaries between the Act and other regulatory systems to avoid overlapping health and safety duties by
- reducing the requirement to notify WorkSafe to significant workplace events (deaths, serious injury, illness and incidents), and
- providing a hotline for the public to report overzealous road cone use, and for WorkSafe to confirm and provide guidance on instances of over-compliance.
Legislation reflecting these changes is expected to be introduced later this year.
