Annual HSNO Enforcement Report 2017
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Report to the Minister for the Environment Enforcement of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 December 2017 www.epa.govt.nz Report on enforcement of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 Table of Contents Purpose................................................................................................................................................... 3 Executive Summary ............................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 6 Background ............................................................................................................................................ 6 Working Safer Reforms ......................................................................................................................... 6 Enforcement Agency Activities and Intentions .................................................................................. 8 Ministry for Primary Industries ....................................................................................................... 8 WorkSafe New Zealand .............................................................................................................. 16 Ministry of Health ......................................................................................................................... 24 New Zealand Transport Agency .................................................................................................. 30 New Zealand Police..................................................................................................................... 30 Civil Aviation Authority ................................................................................................................. 33 Maritime New Zealand ................................................................................................................ 35 Territorial Authorities ................................................................................................................... 37 Regional Councils........................................................................................................................ 41 December 2017 Report on enforcement of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 Purpose 1. This report presents the Environmental Protection Authority’s (EPA’s) assessment of the enforcement of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (the Act) Act 1996 for the 2016/17 year. 2. The EPA is required, under section 99(1) of the Act, to ensure that its provisions are enforced in all premises likely to contain a hazardous substance or new organism. The Act also requires the EPA to advise the Minister for the Environment, and enforcement agencies under the Act, when it considers that there is insufficient or unnecessary inspection and enforcement. Executive Summary 3. Central Government agencies who are responsible for enforcing the provisions of the Act have delivered effective enforcement programmes. However, the performance of territorial authorities continues to remain variable, with smaller authorities having the greatest variability due to the lack of financial and human resource. Regional Councils made a good contribution to the enforcement of the Act, but the EPA would still like to see more involvement. 4. The table below summarises EPA’s assessment of the performance of the section 97 (s 97) hazardous substances and new organisms enforcement agencies for 2016/17. Enforcement agency Assessment of agency performance Ministry for Primary EPA consider the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) to have satisfactory levels Industries of inspection of containment facilities, with approximately 80 percent of these facilities being inspected. The rate of non-compliance amongst containment facilities is relatively low reflecting the work undertaken by the organisation to ensure compliance. However, as with 2015/16, considerable resources have been committed by MPI to resolve a compliance issue with the Kamo Wildlife Sanctuary (formerly Zion Wildlife Gardens) as well as an organisational restructure to establish a dedicated biosecurity verification team and progression of the Zoo Standard. WorkSafe New In 2016/17, WorkSafe spent considerable time preparing to implement the Act Zealand and HSW Hazardous Substance (HS) Regulations which come into force on 1 December 2017. This included working alongside the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to review policy papers, drafting specific HSW HS Regulations, conducting a provision by provision review of the draft HSW HS Regulations, and responding to queries from the Parliamentary Counsel Office and addressing submitter’s comments. While some parts of WorkSafe’s 2016/17 report is not comparable to the data reported in 2015/16, some aspects are, such as the number of HSNO specific workplace assessments which are undertaken. In 2016/17, WorkSafe undertook 2,533 assessments with a hazardous substance focus, which is a decrease from the 2015/16 year when 3,104 assessments were undertaken. The number of HSNO investigations December 2017 Report on enforcement of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 Enforcement agency Assessment of agency performance arising from a workplace assessment went down from 14 in 2015/16 to 12 in 2016/17 as well as the number of enforcement actions taken from 331 in 2015/16 to 225 in 2016/17. The number of prosecutions have remained unchanged. Ministry of Health The Ministry of Health (MoH) has delivered an effective programme of proactive and reactive initiatives to manage public health risks from a wide range of hazardous substance exposures. Given the nature of HSNO enforcement, MoH is generally not the lead agency but rather plays a supporting role. Upcoming changes to enforcement agencies may result in some reassessment of roles and responsibilities. NZ Transport Agency While the New Zealand Transport AgencyWork has the power to enforce the Act “in or on any motor vehicle, on any road, in or on any rail vehicle, or on any railway line”, the NZTA does not enforce HSNO directly and while the Commercial Vehicle Safety Team of the NZ Police will respond to rail incidents involving hazardous substances, it is entirely reactive. This means that there has been no proactive HSNO regulation of rail. NZ Police The Commercial Vehicle Safety Team (CVST) provides a good level of (CVST) hazardous substance enforcement on roads through ensuring compliance with the Land Transport Rule: Dangerous Goods Rule 2005. This is demonstrated through the steady number of vehicles inspected for 2016/17. As in previous years, the CVST has one warranted enforcement officer, a situation that has existed for a number of years. Police are still looking to increase this number, through joint training with WorkSafe. Civil Aviation Authority EPA consider the CAA to be effectively managing the risks associated with hazardous substances in the aviation industry as a result of all reported incidents being assessed for levels of compliance as well as undertaking inflight audits and inspections. The CAA currently has one HSNO warranted officer, with a further two staff members to be warranted in 2017/18. Maritime NZ Maritime New Zealand (MNZ) addresses HSNO through its audit and inspection work conducted through the Maritime Transport (MT) Act. MNZ does not capture specific information on HSNO activities, aside from the number of vessels inspected for legislative compliance against the Act, the IMDG Code and the MT Act as well as the number of warranted HSNO officers on staff. This makes it difficult to determine whether the level of activity involving HSNO has been adequate. The EPA is satisfied that MNZ is enforcing the provisions of the Act when inspecting vessels and are pleased to see that the number of inspections are consistent. Territorial Authorities The EPA ran a successful series of workshops across New Zealand, the purpose of which was to understand the issues being experienced by TAs when enforcing hazardous substances legislation. The EPA is currently in the process December 2017 Report on enforcement of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 Enforcement agency Assessment of agency performance of collating all the information from these workshops and plan to progress a programme of work to increase TA engagement. The overall results from the 2016/17 survey reveal a wide variation in the degree to which TAs are engaged in hazardous substance enforcement activity. The TAs that are most involved tend to be city councils which are able to retain a core number of warranted HSNO enforcement officers who have the HSNO knowledge and experience to enable them to carry out enforcement activities. Smaller TAs have more limited resources so staff have to fulfil multiple roles and appear to find maintaining currency of skills and knowledge a challenge, particularly as they do not have a lot of incidents. A wide variety of issues were raised by TAs this year. Two issues that have been previously raised relate to the test certifiers’ database, the reliability of the data it holds and the time taken to extract data from it, as well as the availability of training in the management and enforcement of hazardous substances. Some councils believed that EPA needed to take more of a lead in HSNO, through providing training