HEALTH AND SAFETY POLICY IN THE WORKPLACE

The Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA) is New Zealand's new workplace health and safety law. It sets out the principles, duties and rights in relation to workplace health and safety.

The aim of this bill is to reduce the number of people killed or hurt at work.
In New Zealand about 50 people die on the job each year and one in 10 is harmed. So what are your obligations under the HSW Act 2015? The new law came into force on April 4 this year and require employers to take “reasonably practicable” steps to manage health and safety risks at work.

Under the new HSWA, senior business leaders are responsible for ensuring that the business is meeting its health and safety responsibilities. Business owners have a duty of due diligence and must put into place systems to monitor and ensure workers are complying with risk manangement strategies

There are a number of options:

• Use a consultant – costing around $150 per hour to go through your business with a fine tooth comb and write up a plan and policy. This is an expensive option for a small business, as putting together a comprehensive, tailored, compliant plan involves many hours work. Worse, if the consultant misses anything and an accident occurs, the law is quite clear that you, as the PCBU, are legally liable. You cannot contract out of, or pass liability on to, another entity.

• Do it yourself:  Creating a compliant plan, and writing a comprehensive policy is a time consuming task. We would estimate a minimum of 200 hours work to do a very basic job. Working on an hourly rate for yourself of, say, $20.00 per hour, your basic plan would cost you at least $4000, plus take you away from the necessary task of keeping your business up and running. Just ask anyone who is trying to work through the MTA’s do-it-yourself guide – the amount of work involved is daunting.

• SOLUTION: Use a SafeTech Health & Safety Plan, covering all the requirements of the Act but giving the individual PCBU the ability to tweak the Plan so as to personalise it to their own business, thus making it suitable for EVERYONE.