News & Press

Improving access to advice and support on occupational health and safety issues to business, especially those organisations with fewer than 250 employees (ie small and medium-sized enterprises – SMEs), has been identified as a key issue in successive UK government policy documents. Several pilot programmes have been launched over the course of the past five years to test potential ways in which access could be provided. Evaluations of these pilot services have generally shown that SMEs are difficult to engage on the issue of occupational health and safety advice, and where they do seek help, this is most often for basic safety advice and with understanding and interpreting health and safety regulations.

Isocyanate paints have been identified as a major cause of occupational asthma in the UK and are thus a serious potential health hazard in the motor vehicle repair sector, where they are in common use. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has undertaken information and advice campaigns aimed at workers and managers in this sector, warning them of the dangers of these paints. It stresses that the negative health effects can be overcome by following procedures such as always wearing air-fed breathing equipment when spraying the paints, and spraying in a controlled environment, such as a spray booth. One of the main dangers is that the spray mist from isocyanate paints is so fine that it cannot be seen by the naked eye. It is therefore vital that the time it takes for the spray to clear from the spray booth – the clearance time – is calculated, posted clearly on the booth and that workers do not enter the booth without breathing equipment before the clearance time has elapsed.

Graduates of creative courses are well placed to ride out the recession, a new study has revealed. Led by University of the Arts London and conducted by IES, Creative Graduates Creative Futures is the largest ever survey of creative graduates’ career paths.

The type of relationship that the UK will have with the rest of the EU now that the new coalition government in place is likely to take shape over time. The government’s coalition programme does not reveal a great deal about its plans for its future relationship with the EU. However, it does state that its primary concern is to ensure that the UK plays a leading role in Europe, but that there is no further transfer of power from the UK to Brussels without a referendum in the UK.

Welfare reform is central to the government’s ambition to address the problem of growing unemployment and worklessness. An early indication of government thinking was set out in a policy speech by Lord Freud at the IES annual policy conference (Whither Welfare to Work?) in November 2009. Lord Freud envisaged a new programme that would bring ‘a good number of the [existing] programmes into one programme, rather than having . . . several’. Among the rationales for such radical reform was a particular view that there were groups of people who were circulating round the welfare-to-work system; from one initiative or another, to short-term jobs, to benefits, and back again.

With a new coalition government in place, and public sector budget cuts under way, it is timely to consider what this means for existing policy around health and work, and what the future might hold.

For many years the focus of education policy was very firmly on the so-called three ‘R’s: reading, writing and arithmetic. Looking ahead, the emerging policy focus of the coalition government in the area of education and skills seems to be on the three ‘A’s: academies, apprenticeships, and austerity.

Details of the new UK government’s policy priorities in areas of interest to IES (including welfare reform, skill development, further and higher education, workforce health and well-being, older workers and pensions, and many others) are only just emerging. However, its approach to the generation and analysis of the evidence base to underpin these priorities remains wholly unclear.