The Health and Safety at Work Act revolutionised workplace safety in the UK (it’s kinda what our campaign is about). However, the law also had unheralded impacts outside of the workplace. Perhaps the most evident, far-reaching and long-lasting was Section 6, and the impact it had on the way products and equipment were designed and manufactured.
Section 6 may only be 1500 words, but the impact it’s had on safety standards in the UK cannot be overstated. From industrial tools and machinery to the items we use everyday, this pioneering safety law raised the bar for product safety, and shifted the mindset of buyers, importers, and ultimately the manufacturers of many products in the UK.
What is Section 6 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974?
Section 6 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 includes rules on the design, manufacture, importation and supply of a range of goods. While a sizable portion is dedicated to fairground rides—something today’s theme park operators should still be mindful of—the rest of Section 6 regulates ‘articles’ and ‘substances’, including workplace tools.
Under this section of the Act, anyone who designs, manufactures, imports or supplies an article or substance to be used at work is liable for its safety. In the context of the law, an article could be any item that is used within the workplace, from a piece of heavy machinery to a tool or other piece of equipment. A substance meanwhile could be anything from flammable materials such as natural gas canisters, to cleaning fluids used by janitorial staff.
The law applies to every part of the supply chain for an article of substance. This means that it must be designed and manufactured to be as safe as possible, and that whoever purchases it for use in the workplace must do their due diligence in ensuring that it is safe. Where the safety of articles or substances can’t be guaranteed due to them being made outside of the UK, the importer should be the first to ensure their safety, but this responsibility will also fall on the buyers and end users.
What Section 6 meant for workplace safety
Section 6 of the Health and Safety at Work Act wasn’t strictly the first time product safety standards had been applied, but it was the first formal attempt to codify product safety as a concept. It predated the landmark Consumer Protection Act by 18 years, and the more comprehensive General Product Safety Directive (which applied EU laws) by 27 years.
As such, it was the first time any burden had been placed on people throughout the supply chain to ensure the products they were selling and using were safe. If a business sold unsafe products to another business without having done everything they reasonably could to ensure their safety, they would be at fault. So too would the business who bought them if they went on to use them without doing everything they could to ensure they were safe.
While there was a certain amount of wriggle room here—the buyer might reasonably expect a product to be safe if bought from a reputable seller—it represented an important shift in how we think about safety. In one stroke, the Health and Safety at Work Act had not only put the burden on employers to keep employees safe at work, but also to ensure that the products and equipment they were using at work would not compromise their safety.
This may seem like a subtle difference; after all, if the equipment isn’t safe to use, then employees obviously won’t be safe at work. But until this point, health and safety at work would have been seen as a matter of protecting people from an obviously dangerous part of a job. Few people would have thought to consider whether the equipment you use to do that job might also constitute a risk, whether that’s hand arm vibration syndrome (HAVS) from using a pneumatic drill, or the risk of exposure to improperly-stored chemicals.
How Section 6 changed manufacturing and design
Products—and particularly work equipment—had never been designed to hurt people, but safety also wasn’t at the forefront of many designers’ minds. The object was to do the job as efficiently as possible, and if this came at the expense of personal safety, that was on the user. Certain jobs were simply accepted as dangerous, and preventing personal injury was a matter of gaining experience and learning how to use the tools right. Any safety measures were self-imposed by manufacturers in response to incidents, rather than being proactive.
The new law meant that manufacturers could no longer simply be concerned with functionality. All of a sudden, they were legally obligated to design products that minimised risks as far as possible. This meant not only incorporating safety features, but conducting studies and research to determine what safety features were necessary, and how to implement them in a way that was user-friendly and cost-effective. While some products may not need much modification, others could be upended by the law.
What this led to was the sudden elimination of potential hazards from a range of products, both during daily use and in maintenance. Manufacturers had to consider the entire product lifecycle, with things like power tools now routinely including features like overload protection and blade guards, directly reducing the risk of injuries. In-house testing and collaborations became more commonplace and extensive, with tools like ladders undergoing rigorous testing to ensure they could support the intended weights, and meet new slip-resistance standards.
Section 6 also made it mandatory to provide clear instructions for safe use, cleaning, and maintenance. This ensured workers had the knowledge they needed to avoid accidents and injuries, with manufacturers required to keep these instructions updated if new risks were discovered. For chemicals (which pose an inherent danger), manufacturers had to provide detailed safety data sheets (SDS) outlining potential hazards and safe handling procedures.
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Section 6 is often overlooked in the grand scheme of the Health and Safety at Work Act, and the changes it made to health and safety regulations in the workplace. But the impact of Section 6 on the way products are designed and manufactured not only revolutionised workplace safety by itself, but also bled over into our daily lives. The changes made to product safety and design philosophies made many products we use in our daily lives safer, improving the safety consciousness of many manufacturers.
We’re putting the spotlight on the Health and Safety at Work Act this month as part of our ‘An Anniversary Worth Celebrating’ campaign. To learn more about the Health and Safety at Work Act and the campaign itself, visit the link above and watch our video riffing on Monty Python, which asks: what has health & safety ever done for us?