Council scheme saves business £1m pounds
21 September 2010
A local council has saved its primary authority business the £1m cost of unnecessary health and safety measures, showing the very real benefits of the red tape cutting scheme.
Leeds City Council has helped specialist trades distributor, BSS Group, develop a robust and cost-effective approach to legionella prevention; as part of a primary authority partnership that provides a single point of contact for health and safety regulation for the Group's 434 sites across the UK.
BSS Group's Health & Safety Manager Sue Smith said the primary authority relationship had a real impact on the way they now approached health and safety.
She said: "We were concerned about the need to properly address the risk from legionella at our sites, and hired a consultancy to devise a control strategy. The total cost for implementation of their recommendations would have been in excess of £1m."
She said they approached Leeds City Council officers who suggested an equally effective way of managing the risk but at much lower cost.
Leeds City Council's Health and Environmental Action Services Manager, Steve Wood, said: "The costs of implementing our recommendations are negligible and can be dealt with through existing processes under the partnership.
"The annual cost of our primary authority partnership to BSS is around £5,000, meaning that this piece of advice alone has already paid for itself 200 times over."
Primary authority partnerships are legally binding agreements between a single local authority and a business, and backed by statutory powers enforced by LBRO, the technical expert in better local regulation.
LBRO Chairman Clive Grace said: "The Leeds/BSS partnership is a superb demonstration of how local regulators and business can work together to make real savings in time and money while maintaining protection for workers and the general public."
For companies operating under two or more local councils, Primary Authority provides reliable and consistent advice from a single source when dealing with environmental health, trading standards, health and safety, and licensing services.
Options for extending the Primary Authority scheme are currently being considered. There are now 326 partnerships covering 106 businesses, more than 21,000 premises and 283,000 employees. A full, up to date list of partnerships and the regulations they cover are maintained on the LBRO website. Visit: www.lbro.org.uk/pa-public-listings.php
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