EU Offshore Safety Regulation – An Update

It is rare to find an issue on which regulators, industry associations and trade unions are in total agreement but the EU's proposed regulation of the offshore industry is one of them (see our earlier Law-Now here). At an Oil & Gas UK conference held earlier this month to discuss the proposal there was a very clear acceptance that the industry could not be complacent and had to strive for continuous improvement in offshore safety but an equally clear belief that the best way to achieve such improvement was by continued co-operation and collaboration between all of the stakeholders rather than an additional layer of regulation from Brussels. The rapid and effective action taken through OSPRAG to respond to the Macondo incident was cited as evidence of the effectiveness of such a collaborative approach.