But how do you know that you have identified all the relevant legislation?  And more importantly, how would you prove to an external organisation like the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) that you have identified all the relevant legislation?

What most organisations do is to prepare, and keep up to date, what is often referred to as a Legal Register.  Typically, this consists only of the titles of the items of legislation the organisation has identified as being relevant, but a few organisation include information on, for example, the content of the legislation.  We will consider this additional information later, but for now we will stick to just the titles of the legislation.

It is easy to obtain a list of legislation that is enforced by the HSE – it is freely available on their website – and the Legal Register of many organisations simply consists of this HSE list with those items that are not relevant to the organisation deleted. [There are some errors in this list but they do not affect the generality of organisations. ]

However, there is a whole lot of legislation that falls within the health and safety remit that is not enforced by the HSE.  Perhaps the most well known of this type of legislation is the need for an 'accident book' or equivalent.  This is not health and safety legislation at all, it is social security legislation and is there for the purposes of sick pay.

Other example of legislation that is usually dealt with by health and safety professionals, despite it not being enforced by the HSE include the following.

Consumer protection legislation.  Normally this type of legislation applies only to organisations who are manufacturing goods for sale but for certain equipment such as gas installations and pressure systems the legislation applies to organisations assembling these for use in house.

Public health legislation.  The legislation on signs to do with not smoking at workplaces is an example of this type of legislation.

Terms and conditions of employment legislation.  This is the category of legislation under which the Working Time Regulations 1998 sit.

These examples illustrate that the HSE has a restricted view on what constitutes health and safety.  This is not a criticism – it is the way they were set up.  However, if you do not keep an accident book (or equivalent) or you have inadequate no smoking signs it is not a defence to say that the HSE do not enforce these items of legislation.

The practical implication of this is that your health and safety professionals have to do a lot of work to identify what legislation there is out there, and whether it is relevant to you.  The amount of legislation enacted is increasing; in 2008, there were 1666 Statutory Instruments, in 2009 there were 2008, and in 2010 there were 2971.  We are writing this at the beginning of August 2011 and already there are 1897 Statutory Instruments for 2011.  Have your safety professionals checked them all?

Every organisation needs a robust procedure for identifying relevant legislation.  If your procedure does not involve safety professionals checking enacted legislation what does it involve?

So, one problem is identifying what legislation applies.  The next problem is identifying what the legislation requires you to do.  On the face of it, this should be simple.  All the legislation is available to download, free, from the legislation.gov.uk website so you can readily identify what the legislation says.  But then you encounter the dreaded 'amendments'.  The legislation that you download from the website may bear little relation to the current requirements because it has been amended by one or more other items of legislation.  The legislation.gov.uk website freely admits that it does not keep Statutory Instruments up to date but gives no advice on what to do about it.  Amendments can be numerous, for example there have been nine Statutory Instruments whose sole purpose has been to amend the Working Time Regulations mentioned earlier including, confusingly, the Working Time Regulations 1999.  If you want to get an idea of how difficult it is to identify what the law requires, try to find the text of the legislation that tells you what you have to record in an accident book.

One obvious way of getting round the problem is to use the HSE's published guidance on the legislation since this guidance includes the amendments.  There are three problems with this.

1. The HSE does not produce guidance on all of the items of legislation it enforces.
2. The HSE does not automatically produce revised guidance when legislation is amended so that there may have been amendments to the legislation after the guidance was published.
3. The HSE guidance has occasional errors, for example, the guidance on the First Aid Regulations (published in 2009) does not contain an amendment made by the Health and Safety (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations in 2002).

it is easy to get a list of legislation enforced by the HSE but this does not cover all relevant health and safety legislation, and

it is extremely difficult to be sure that you have an accurate picture of what is required by particular items of legislation.

There are good legal information services available that list all the legislation that might be relevant to health and safety and all the amendments to it.  The problem is that they do this for everyone so that you get information on offshore legislation, railway legislation, mines and quarries legislation merchant shipping legislation and so on, whether you need it or not.  This means that you are paying for information you do not need and your safety professionals waste time maintaining up to date information on irrelevant legislation.

A much better option is a Legal Register service that provides the following.

A setup service.  If you already have a Legal Register this service involves reviewing it for extent (does it include everything relevant) and accuracy (is it up to date with amendments) and making any necessary changes.  If you not already have a Legal Register this service sets one up for you.

A 'key requirements' service.  For each of the relevant items of legislation you are provided with a summary of its key requirements so that you can work out what you have to do to comply.

An update service.  Every quarter you are sent details of any new items of legislation that you should add to your Legal Register.  You are not sent information on new items of information that are not relevant to you.  You are also sent details of any changes required to individual items of legislation already in your Legal Register.

An annual review service.  Every year the content of your Legal Register is reviewed for accuracy to ensure that no errors have crept in, or material inadvertently deleted.

When you consider the amount of time your safety professionals need to spend to ensure that you can be happy that your organisation knows what it has to do to comply with health and safety legislation, it is more cost effective to subscribe to a Legal Register service.  Providers of Legal Register services spend many days each year reading new legislation and summarising its requirements.  However, because they can spread the cost over their client base they are able to charge each client only a fraction of the overall cost.

It is our experience that the vast majority of organisations have an incomplete list of what safety and health legislation they should be complying with and little idea of whether the items in this incomplete list are up to date.  In addition, there is rarely any record of the requirements imposed by the legislation.  Taken together, these three weaknesses mean that organisations are not even in a position to demonstrate that they know what they should be complying with, let alone demonstrate that they are complying with health and safety legislation 'on the ground'. 

Subscribing to a Legal Register service would at least give you peace of mind with regard to the first two weaknesses, and would give you a sound information base from which to tackle the third.

This is exactly what Hastam's Legal Register Service sets out to do.