| Redwood's right you know |
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| Written by Tim Worstall | |
| Friday, 17 August 2007 | |
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John Redwood hasn't half taken a lot of stick for his proposal to reduce
the amount of health and safety regulation in his recent policy paper.
Apparently any weakening of the regulations on how many "wash your
hands" signs there must be is equivalent to stuffing 6 year olds up
chimneys again. The go to guy on risks and regulation is Kip Viscusi (now at Vanderbilt) and as he points out , Redwood's right to play down the value of such regulations. There are three major sources of financial incentives for job safety. By far the most important is the market. Workers on dangerous jobs generally perceive that they are dangerous. This drives up their wages and gives the company an incentive to make the workplace safer. If you look at it empirically, this dwarfs everything else that is going on.Translated into the British scene, OSHA is our own HSE. All of their mountains of rules and regulations account for some 1-2% of the total effect: it's markets that provide the vast majority of the safety that we do enjoy at work. Reducing this paperwork mountain will indeed save a fortune and have almost no effect at all on the general level of safety. It seems such an obviously beneficial thing to do, why is anyone at all arguing against the idea?
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