A collaboration with Discovering Safety to create a safetytech regulatory sandbox

Safetytech Accelerator is collaborating with Discovering Safety (a programme of work led by the Health and Safety Executive, HSE) to create a regulatory sandbox exploring industrial safetytech, to explore how innovative solutions can progress to deployment.

This new project, ‘Enabling Innovation in Industrial SafetyTECH’, has been made possible by a grant from the £12 million Regulators’ Pioneer Fund launched by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

Similar to other countries, Great Britain’s health and safety performance has seen significant improvements over the last 30 years. However, HSE statistics show that over a million workers are injured or made ill by their work each year. This impacts individuals, families, employers, government and wider society.

Technology is changing rapidly and industrial safetytech, or technologies aimed at safety in the workplace, can play a crucial role in not only in directly improving safety and reducing risk, but also promoting compliance with health and safety legislation, especially for Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

Yet a host of barriers to adoption including regulation, are stifling this opportunity and the adoption of technologies in the workplace. This is, ultimately what the project is looking to change.

The industrial safetytech regulatory sandbox will bring together regulators and industry in a non-regulatory environment to explore how innovative solutions can progress to deployment. It will benefit both regulators and industry, providing clarity to innovators on regulatory expectations and confidence for industry to invest in and adopt industrial safetytech as well as develop new thinking on improving regulatory delivery and performance.

Dr. Maurizio Pilu, Managing Director of Safetytech Accelerator said of the collaboration: “I am delighted and honoured to collaborate with the Health and Safety Executive on this project, arguably the first of its kind. A regulatory sandbox is a mechanism to unlock improvements both for innovation in regulation and regulation for innovation. Collaborating on this project gives us a new opportunity to deliver our mission of supporting the wider adoption of industrial safetytech. Over the coming week we will be sharing more details on the project and we will be jointly calling on industry and innovators to express their interest in participating. Please stay tuned!”

Read more:

• Read the announcement from Discovering Safety here
• The UK Government announcement of the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund awards
• The UK Minister for Science, Research, Technology and Innovation on Sky News