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Health and Safety at Work Act 2015

Worker engagement, participation, and representation - Provisional improvement notices

69: Provisional improvement notices

You could also call this:

“Health and safety reps can issue notices to address workplace safety concerns”

When you’re a health and safety representative, you can give out a special notice called a provisional improvement notice if you think someone is breaking or might break the health and safety rules. This notice tells the person they need to fix the problem, stop it from happening, or change things that are causing the problem.

Before you give someone this notice, you need to talk to them first. It’s important to know that you can’t give out this notice if an inspector has already given an improvement notice or a prohibition notice about the same issue.

If you do give someone a provisional improvement notice, you need to give a copy of it to the person in charge of your work group as soon as you can.

Remember, you can only do this if you have a good reason to believe there’s a problem with following the health and safety rules. This helps keep everyone safe at work.

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View the original legislation for this page at https://legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1986/0120/latest/link.aspx?id=DLM5977000.

Topics:
Work and jobs > Worker rights
Work and jobs > Workplace safety
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“Extra rules for health and safety in mining”

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“Training needed before health and safety reps can issue improvement notices”

Part 3 Worker engagement, participation, and representation
Provisional improvement notices

69Provisional improvement notices

  1. This section applies if a health and safety representative reasonably believes that a person is contravening, or is likely to contravene, a provision of this Act or regulations.

  2. The health and safety representative may issue a provisional improvement notice requiring the person to—

  3. remedy the contravention; or
    1. prevent a likely contravention from occurring; or
      1. remedy the things or activities causing the contravention or likely to cause a contravention.

        1. However, the health and safety representative must not issue a provisional improvement notice to a person unless he or she has first consulted the person.

        2. A health and safety representative must not issue a provisional improvement notice in relation to a matter if an inspector has already issued an improvement notice or a prohibition notice in relation to the same matter.

        3. If a health and safety representative issues a provisional improvement notice, he or she must provide a copy of that notice to the PCBU of the work group that the health and safety representative represents, as soon as practicable.

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