A leading health and safety coalition has issued a call to arms for the government to scrap the arbitrary deadlines of the EU Retained Law Bill to help the UK retain its position as a beacon of health and safety.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has spearheaded the coalition, which is concerned about government plans to remove EU legislation from the statute book.

Since the implementation of vital legislation like The Health and Safety at Work Act and The Construction (Design & Management) Regulations, the UK has seen workplace accidents decline by a staggering 90%.

However, the Retained EU Law Bill (REUL), currently going through parliament, threatens to abolish approximately 4,000 pieces of longstanding legal protections on 31 December.

Retained EU Law is a category of domestic law created at the end of the transition period. It is made up of certain pieces of EU legislation that were ‘cut and pasted’ onto the UK statute book as the UK’s own version of these laws. REUL is also made up of certain domestic laws that implemented EU law and were preserved as REUL on the UK statute book.

The coalition has identified over 300 pieces of vital legislation that apply to UK health and safety regulations which are of particularly serious concern to our national and personal safety.

RoSPA Head of Policy Nathan Davies said:

“The speed at which government wants to proceed with the Bill means it’s not simply the cost to life that poses a risk, but also the cost to industry. The legal confusion and uncertainty shrouding the Bill, combined with varying interpretations of the law, is set to leave businesses in the dark when it comes to compliance. It is therefore natural to draw the conclusion that the financial implications of the Bill, with potential prosecutions and settlements, stand to be astronomical. Not only this, but businesses rely on their people, so the need for you to stand up and protect your workers is now greater than ever.”

The coalition believes the Bill’s timeframe must be extended so that health and safety specialists can develop what came before, and produce improved, evidence-founded laws that will ensure that nothing relating to the intrinsic safety of Britain’s people is allowed to go up in smoke.

Lord Hendy (Labour), an English barrister and politician acknowledged as one of the country's leading experts in UK labour law, commented:

“Most employment rights to health and safety are EU law. All a minster has to do is sit on his hands and all these vital protections, hitherto enjoyed by our 30 million workers, will disappear in a puff of smoke without parliamentary scrutiny. That’s unacceptable and it also appears to be a flouting of the obligations we undertook to maintain and implement health and safety laws.”

Political campaigner Baroness Altmann (Conservative) said:

“I’ve watched in horror in the last few years the stripping away of norms. The idea we should throw our laws into a big hat, pull out a few, change a few, and throw the rest away, without even knowing which, cannot be the way to run a country.”

The Baroness Jolly (Liberal Democrat), President of RoSPA, said:

“We tend to think of the United Kingdom as a global beacon for safety. Over the last 50 years, legally enshrined protections have saved more than 125,000 lives and prevented more than 1 million hospitalisations. This has not happened by luck; it has happened because of our role as pioneers in evidence-based research, alongside our international partners. Many of these vital measures are in retained EU law and are on track to be repealed at the end of this year. They include, quite alarmingly, rules on child and adult seat belts—my noble friend Lady Randerson touched on this—hazardous substances and chemical safety standards, and essential product safety.”

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