ABSTRACT
The Health and Safety at Work Act came into official existence in November 1974. Two years earlier the Robens Committee had reported on the state of existing UK health and safety law. The history of health and safety law in the UK since 1974 has been one of continual growth of regulation and guidance. The essence of duties of care is that they are, in the jargon used to describe health and safety law, 'goal setting'. In 1999 Philip James and David Walters published a review of UK health and safety law. In 1997 the explosives and pyrotechnics expert Tom Smith published a research paper3 that compared the state of UK safety law and its enforcement 25 years after the Robens Report with the report's original findings. Health and safety is not a monster. It is not even a chimera, a mythical monster.
