Tories table plans to amend health and safety laws for police
May 16, 2008
Plans to amend the Health and Safety at Work, etc Act 1974 to ensure police officers can do their jobs unhindered have been tabled this week by the Conservative Party.
Shadow Home Secretary David Davis expressed concern regarding the "excessively wide interpretations" of the Act currently adopted by safety regulators.
"Too often, right-minded officers are weighed down by the suffocating swelter of form-filling, box-ticking and bureaucracy," Mr Davis said. "This has fed a health and safety culture that makes the police less healthy, and the public less safe. This nonsense has got to stop."
The issue of police health and safety was addressed in a high-profile case in 2003 in which former Metropolitan Police Commissioners Lord Stevens and Lord Condon faced prosecution by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in relation to the death of an officer who fell from a rooftop while in pursuit of a suspect. The case was thrown out by Mr Justice Crane and in the wake of the judgment, Lord Stevens said that a successful prosecution would have caused "irreparable damage to the way we police in Britain".
Mr Davis said that he would seek to amend s.2 of the Act in order to ensure that "in conducting police operations, the risk to the public is prioritised above the risk to individual officers".
"A Conservative Government will change the law to ensure that, when officers respond to an emergency, they put public protection above all other considerations," he said.
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