{"id":3257,"date":"2024-11-28T15:09:11","date_gmt":"2024-11-28T15:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/?p=3257"},"modified":"2024-12-06T14:46:49","modified_gmt":"2024-12-06T14:46:49","slug":"50-years-on-the-1974-health-and-safety-at-work-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/?p=3257","title":{"rendered":"50 Years On: the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Safety<\/a>

Safety poster, c.1979, courtesy British Safety Council.<\/p><\/div>\n

Love it or hate it, you can\u2019t escape it: the Health and Safety at Work Act has been an important part of UK working life (and wider) for 50 years.<\/p>\n

To mark its 50th<\/sup> anniversary, a day-long symposium was held in London on 25 November 2024: Health & Safety at Work Act \u2013 50 years on: still fit for purpose?<\/a><\/p>\n

It was hosted by the Trade Union & Employment Forum of History & Policy<\/a>, and brought together practitioners, trades unionists and academics \u2013 including the University of Portsmouth History team\u2019s Dr Mike\u00a0Esbester<\/a>.\u00a0 Mike\u2019s research focuses on histories of safety, risk and accident prevention in modern Britain. Some of that has looked at the changing landscape of health and safety at work and beyond since 1960 \u2013 including the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act. The change of law was much needed; in the 1960s and early 1970s, UK workplaces were still killing and injuring large number of people. Their impacts were felt beyond the factory walls, too, as workplace incidents affected more than \u2018just\u2019 employees.<\/p>\n

The principles underlying the Act had both radical and conservative elements. They extended the duty of care far beyond the boundaries of the workplace. At the same time, they modelled older ideas about who was able to prevent harm. Mike brought these tensions and contradictions out in his presentation to the symposium, which gave a long-term historical overview of the Act\u2019s originals.\u00a0 He\u2019s explored some of these aspects in\u00a0this piece for\u00a0The Conversation<\/em><\/a>. This piece,\u00a0written for History & Policy at the 40th<\/sup>\u00a0anniversary of the Act<\/a>, is also still relevant today. All of this work draws upon Mike\u2019s research, including the\u00a0\u2018Changing Legitimacy of Health and Safety at Work\u2019 project<\/a>, funded by the Institution of Occupational Safety & Health.<\/p>\n

The symposium brought together different approaches, from the historical to the present day, the philosophical to the practical. It wrestled with the question of how far the 1974 Act has kept pace with the world around it, and whether or not it might be time for a new means of approaching health and safety in the UK.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Love it or hate it, you can\u2019t escape it: the Health and Safety at Work Act has been an important part of UK working life (and wider) for 50 years. To mark its 50th anniversary, a day-long symposium was held in London on 25 November 2024: Health & Safety at Work Act \u2013 50 years on: still fit for purpose? It was hosted by the Trade Union & Employment Forum of History & Policy, and brought together practitioners, trades unionists and academics \u2013 including the University of Portsmouth History team\u2019s Dr Mike\u00a0Esbester.\u00a0 Mike\u2019s research focuses on histories of safety, risk and accident prevention in modern Britain. Some of that has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":3259,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18,4],"tags":[511,500,52,146,609,11,753,98],"class_list":["post-3257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-public-history","category-research-in-focus","tag-conferences","tag-employment","tag-health-and-safety","tag-instituttion-of-occupational-safety-and-health","tag-legislation","tag-slider","tag-trades-unions","tag-twentieth-century"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/history.port.ac.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/1979-BSC-judge-poster-cropped.jpg?fit=620%2C300&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p91PlX-Qx","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3257"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3260,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3257\/revisions\/3260"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}