Two examples may help to explain this.
First, up to now, employers have been required to ‘conduct’ their work activities in a safe manner. This duty has now been replaced by a more stringent requirement to safely ‘manage and conduct’ workplace activities.
The inclusion of the word ‘manage’ effectively means that all employers must now give the same attention to health and safety matters as they would to other key business tasks.
Next, no form of employment is entirely risk free. The existing law recognised that. It accepted that, in limited circumstances, employers might expose workers to a risk of injury where the likelihood of an accident happening was small and the cost of eliminating the hazard (in terms of time, money and trouble) was very high.
That sort of flexibility has been removed by the new Act. That’s been done by introducing a statutory definition of a key phrase (‘reasonably practicable’) that is often used to assess standards of workplace safety.
The overall effect of this change is to impose stricter health and safety obligations on employers.
