Leading Article: Legislation is no way to tackle stress

EVERYONE IS in favour of minimum standards of protection for people at work; the argument is always over the definition of the minimum. That is why "health and safety" has always been such a battlefield in the politics of the labour market. The last government objected to the European Commission trying to limit the working week under this heading.

Now the British Health and Safety Executive is trying to extend its remit, by equating employers' responsibility for the physical well-being of their workers with a duty to avoid subjecting them to "unsafe" levels of stress. This is going too far. There are many things wrong with the modern work culture - long hours, stress, and incompatibility with family life being three of them. Bad employers are beginning to lose compensation cases fought with stressed-out employees in the courts. Good employers are gradually changing their attitudes for the better. And it is valuable that some of the HSE's research points out that many employees do not like working in teams, or in open-plan offices, or from home. The search for better ways of working needs to look beyond the conventional wisdoms.

But attitudes and working methods cannot and should not be changed by regulation. What the flexible, family-friendly labour market of the future does not need is yet another pile of well intentioned guidelines, from yet another taxpayer-funded quango, which are designed to go straight into the bin of some over-stretched and harassed "human resources" executive.