Update on the Health & Safety at Work Act 2015

Wednesday March 9, 2016 13:47

The New Health & Safety at Work Act 2015

As I am sure you understand by now, the new HSW Act comes into force on the 4th of April 2016.

We are aware that many Securo clients have been working with their safety consultants to start the process of working towards preparing for this change. Many organisations are now actively working on Risk Rating their hazards as part of the preparation.

At Securo we are working very hard to get prepared for the change in legislation, this involves:

• Revising the manual and all forms for the new requirements and the language of the new Act

• Updating the Securo Online system to reflect these changes

• Building a new web based access to all forms for those who do not use the “Securo Online” system. We will update you on this once it is available.

We expect to have this work completed by mid to late April. WorkSafe NZ will not expect you to be compliant with the new requirements on day 1. Some of the delay in completing our review, is due to ACC’s late announcement that they will launch their changes to the ACC WSMP & WSD Certification programmes at a later date.

There will be a modest fee for the revised manual, this will include:

• The manual

• All revised forms

• An hour of additional consulting time when your consultant delivers the manual to you

• Any further revisions in the following 12 months - we already know there will be some further requirements

We will be sending out order forms for the revised manual shortly.

New Regulations

To support the new Act, there will be a raft of new / revised regulations. Regulations are what gives the detail to the Act – think of them as the “How To” documents.

The first of the new Regulations have been released, they are:

• General Workplace Regulations

• Regulations Concerning Hazardous Machinery

• Regulations for the Extractive Sector

• Regulations Controlling Hazardous Processes

• Adventure Activities Regulations

You can access these at http://www.business.govt.nz/worksafe/hswa/legislation/hswa-regulations .

We would suggest that all businesses should read the “General Workplace Regulations” and then select from the others as applicable. There will be additional new regulations released over the coming months.

Health & Safety Representative Transition Training

Government funded courses to brief existing Health & Safety Reps about their responsibilities under new Act are filling fast.  

MBIE selected a sole provider to deliver the face to face courses around NZ and online courses have commenced as of the end of February. The face to face courses are a half day and the online courses approx. 3 hours.

To qualify for the Free Transition Training, you will need to be already trained to HSR Stage 1 by an approved WorkSafe NZ provider.

To check availability of both face to face and online courses go to https://hsr-training.safetynaction.co.nz/?_ga=1.19423931.2026022855.1457313040  

Current Reps who miss out on the free courses, will have the option to attend a course via any 3 trainers, these being CTU, Impac & Business New Zealand.   This training will incur a cost.

These three providers will also have a new two day course for new Reps but due to a delays in registering the new Unit Standard, these will be delayed until next month.