Occupational Safety and Health Legislation and Regulations
Domain 1 tests whether you can identify duty holders, apply the test of reasonable practicability, and choose the correct enforcement outcome for a given site failure.
Duty holders
- Employer / principal contractor: safe plant and substances, safe systems of work, competent supervision, information, instruction and training, safe access and egress, and welfare facilities.
- Workers: reasonable care of themselves and others, cooperation with controls, correct use of PPE, reporting hazards and defects.
- Designers, manufacturers, suppliers: reduce hazards at source and pass on adequate information.
- Duties extend to non-employees: visitors, neighbours, the public.
- Workers must be consulted, usually through safety committees or elected representatives.
Reasonably practicable
Weigh the risk against the sacrifice (time, trouble, cost) needed to control it. The defence succeeds only where that sacrifice is grossly disproportionate to the risk reduction. Cheap control of a serious risk is always required, and custom and practice is never a defence.
Enforcement
An improvement notice sets a deadline to remedy a contravention. A prohibition notice halts an activity immediately where there is risk of serious personal injury. Both are appealable; breaching either is an offence, as is obstructing an inspector.
Worked example
A subcontractor says first-floor edge guardrails are too expensive and offers harnesses instead. The risk is a fatal fall; guardrails are cheap and remove the hazard, while harnesses sit at the bottom of the hierarchy and depend on anchors and correct use. Cost is not grossly disproportionate, so the defence fails, and a prohibition notice fits because the danger is immediate.
Traps
Reading reasonably practicable as a general cost excuse; using PPE to justify a design that should be engineered out; muddling improvement and prohibition notices; omitting designer and consultation duties.