Step forward the inspectors from the Health and Safety Inspectorate, who this year will charge up to £256 per hour to tell companies what they are doing wrong wrt health and safety. These charges are not called "charges" by the HSE, but are referred to by the innocuous phrases "cost recovery scheme" and "fee for intervention scheme" (didn't wee Gordon Brown use a similar verbal sleight of hand to refer to spending as "investment"?).
The charges, from £133 per hour for normal investigations up to £256 for “specialist work”, will be levied from the moment that "a rule infringement" is detected.
Ker Farking Ching!
Now those of you who have even half an ounce of common sense can see a wee bit of a problem here, wrt "conflict of interest". Clearly if the Inspectorate is paid by the hour, it is in the Inspectorate's interest to increase its workload and find fault with every little thing.
Am I right, or am I wrong?
Anyhoo the HSE, facing a rightly deserved backlash over these rip off fees, have delayed the implementation of the new regime from April until October 2012.
Seemingly the official reason for the delay is to discuss "technical aspects of the scheme”.
Gordon MacDonald, HSE's programme director, said:
Ken,
ReplyDeleteKer-farking-ching indeed!
You are right regarding the conflict of interest.....It's a kin to a glazier lobbing a brick through your window with a note saying, I repair windows......Thsi is only different because you can tell the glazier to get lost, the HSE you can't.
Language is very important to the cultural Marxists.......We have recently seen that using the wrong language, can land you in gaol for 56 days.......No matter how offensive words are, they are ONLY words. I think the student wrote things in bad taste but, they are only words. The right to free speech muct include the right to be offensive.
How can they justify charging so much? That translates to just under £1000 per day (or just over £234,000 per year) for 9-5 work. That's for the bottom end inspections!
ReplyDeleteAre the skills for this truly so hard to acquire? Are the costs so high that such amounts should be charged?
They are delaying the implementation of this cr*p until October, in the hope that we will have forgotten about it by then, so that they can 'bury' it under other news. Most of this elf'n'safety has ruined the country. I thought Cameron pledged to put a stop to this kind of nonsense when he became prime minister?
ReplyDeleteGordon MacDonald (Why are so many porridge wogs political?) said:-
ReplyDelete"The Government has agreed that it is right that those who break the law should pay their fair share of the costs to put things right - and not the public purse".
These bastard Health & Safety Inspectors are not self-employed. Therefore for the public purse not to suffer they must at least charge enough money to justify their wages and find enough work to fill their days.
How come that they have already anticipated and assessed that enough people will break the ‘laws’?
Could it be that they themselves are responsible for inventing the ‘laws’ in the first place?
My brother runs a SME, t/o about £1,000,000. He works more hours than I ever did before retirement. He is supplied every month with a CD rom of new rules and regs.
DeleteHe was visited by 'elf'n'safety and produced his mass of risk assessments etc......He did it by the book at vast cost in terms of time and efforet......The inspector bollocked him for not doing a risk assessment in relation to him getting out of his car and walking into his unit......Is this the "type of offence" that they'll use to generate chargable hours?
It is this obsession with regulations and petty rules that makes our industry unable to compete on the global markets. Well that and the crazy rates of taxation that we all have to pay to fund hi-viz clad jobsworths.
Everyone who comes across grillings by the EnS gestapo should make a video of it and post it on youtube (like the bloke who took photos of a factory and met the hi-viztapo). The more we see people making a complete arse of themselves the more likely this nonsense will stop.
DeleteOf course they might want you to stop making a video of them, but you could always quote EnS by saying we have to record all activities for our "insurance".
Howard: I also have to record what you are doing and saying 'for quality and training purposes'!
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing inherently wrong with H&S legislation, first made in 1974. In fact it's a workable law based on the notion of risk. However, like many other things, it's use and interpretation by timewasting deadbeats and people with a problem with power are making the Act itself problematic. The answer - shoot all those who try to enact the law with very little understanding of what it is about.
ReplyDelete