Employers no longer burdened with cumbersome equipment safety legislation

The Occupational Health and Safety Authority (OHSA) has updated regulations regarding the safe use of work equipment, in order to make them more comprehensive and easier to follow.

According to the Authority, the reason behind the new legislation was the problems the previous one created for employers.

“Apart from a general regulation concerning the minimum safety and health requirements for the use of work, there were various others issued along the years, dating as far back as 1949. This was always felt as too cumbersome for the employers to follow as one had to go through a number of regulations to establish the legal requirements of a company, especially if some of the regulations or provisions were no longer applicable following the publication of L.N. 282 / 2004,” the Authority said in a statement.

The Authority said that these new legislations are aimed at improving this situation.

“Throughout this process, OHSA endeavoured to remove from the regulations unnecessary bureaucratic burdens on employers and repeal old regulations that are no longer applicable and relevant,” OHSA CEO Mark Gauci said.

“It also ventured to have the minimum number of regulations concerning work equipment while consolidating occupational health and safety regulations dealing with work equipment,” he added.

The new work equipment regulations, according to the Authority, now incorporate all the relevant regulations from the legal notices that are still applicable and which were not included in LN282/2004.

“It should be noted that all the provisions of LN282 / 2004, which were transposed from the European Directive, were kept entirely and none have been amended. All other relevant provisions taken from the other legal notices were added to the new proposed version of the work equipment regulation,” the Authority said.

The Authority has reportedly reviewed and amended or removed legislations as required in order to remove any unnecessary burdens on the employers, such as the sending to the Authority copies of certificates of inspection of certain types of work equipment.

“These new regulations will be easier to understand and follow, and we augur that this will lead to higher standards of occupational health and safety,” Gauci said.

The new regulations can be viewed on the OHSA website at www.ohsa.org.mt