As most of you will know, Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) regulations are the health & safety laws which require employers to prevent or reduce workers’ exposure to hazardous substances.

These laws cover substances including cleaning chemicals and the fumes, dusts and vapours that they produce, as well as biological agents and other substances relevant to the cleaning industry.

Here at Jangro, we provide COSHH Risk Assessments for all our products, while our wide selection of wall charts includes Good Practice Top 10 Safety Tips developed with COSHH in mind, and our COSHH Learning Management Solution training course is one of our most popular.

Limiting workers’ exposure to substances that could harm them is vitally important, and the cleaning industry has worked hard to comply, developing a myriad of risk assessments, training programmes and best practice guides to help users clean safely and efficiently.

Is change on the way?

While any change is likely to be many years down the line, a recent report from independent employers’ organisation the Confederation of British Industry raised an interesting question: What is the future of COSHH in a post-Brexit UK?

It points out that COSHH and many other health & safety laws, labelling and classification systems are European-driven regulations. Key points raised by the report include:

• “Many of these regulations have been expensive to implement since their introduction;
• If the UK’s chemicals regulations are no longer recognised as equivalent to the EU’s, chemicals businesses may face multiple sets of requirements;
• Some businesses see opportunities for risk-based reform of what are today hazard-based regulations in the long-term;
• Given the detailed nature of these regulations, a lengthy transitionary period for businesses and regulators to adapt to any changes would be needed.”

The UK’s changing relationship with the EU will lead to an evolution in our regulatory environment, and here at Jangro we intend to remain at the forefront of the debate.

The existing COSHH regulations have brought standardisation to health & safety in the cleaning industry, and have helped shape the training landscape too, but improvements are always possible, and we look forward to informing the discussion over what shape the next stage of the regulatory evolution should take. Keep an eye on future blog posts to see how things develop.