The Law Is Changing – Are You Ready?

New Zealand workplace health and safety legislation is changing – but you have a bit more time to be ready. The Health and Safety Reform Bill currently before Parliament is now scheduled to pass into law sometime in the second half of 2015, rather than the original date of April 2015.

What are the changes?

Under the new legislation, individual people (not just the companies) will be held responsible. Directors or officers have a primary duty of care to ensure the health and safety of workers and others. They must exercise due diligence to ensure that the organisation complies with that duty. That includes making sure there are appropriate processes for receiving and considering information about incidents, hazards, and risks and responding to them in a timely way. If they do not take reasonable steps to ensure that they are kept informed of risks and hazards, they will be in breach of the law and personally liable. If there is a safety issue and they do nothing, they will be in breach of the law and personally liable. And even if they delegate responsibility to others they still remain responsible.

Workers will be required to take on more responsibility. Under the new legislation they will have a duty to take reasonable care for their own health and safety and ensure that their actions do not affect the health and safety of others. They will also have to comply with reasonable instructions concerning health and safety and co-operate with relevant policies and procedures.

Is your business ready?

With several months to go to the workplace health and safety legislation change, you've got time to make some good decisions to ensure your business is ready. The first step is to be aware of what the legislation means for your business:

• Increased requirements on company directors to ensure risks are managed and workers are kept safe
• A requirement for greater worker participation in workplace health and safety.
• The establishment of stronger penalties for breaches, enforcement tools, graduated offence categories and court powers.

To meet your obligations under the new legislation you may need to take a number of actions. You will likely need to make changes to your business systems and processes. You may need to add new requirements to existing roles to even create a new position within your company. Here's an initial checklist:

• Arrange additional training
• Arrange additional risk assessment
• Revise existing health and safety policies
• Create new health and safety policies
• Revise existing job descriptions
• Create a new position to oversee the flows of health and safety information.
• Revise employment contracts

It's a challenging time, particularly if you're a small to medium business, to ensure that you meet the requirements of the legislation. But now is the time to take action to get your business ready before the Bill becomes law.