Health & Safety at Work Amendment Bill
The Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill was passed on 1 July 2026 and received Royal Assent on 13 July 2026, making it law. Changes take effect 1 April 2027. It's the most significant update to the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA) since it was introduced, and for an industry built around working at height, it's worth understanding exactly what's changing.
The core change: a focus on critical risk
The amendments refocus HSWA on critical risk, so PCBUs (persons conducting a business or undertaking) are clear about what to prioritise. A risk counts as critical if it's tied to:
a hazard listed in the Act's new Schedule 1A, or
any hazard likely to result in death, a notifiable injury, illness or incident, or a listed occupational disease.
Working at height sits directly in Schedule 1A. For scaffolding, that's about as clear a confirmation as it gets. Fall risk stays a top-tier priority under the new framework, not something that gets deprioritised because it's "business as usual."
One clarification worth noting: "likely to result" refers to the severity of the outcome if something goes wrong, not the likelihood of the incident itself happening. In other words, a fall from height doesn't need to be a common occurrence on your sites to count as critical; it only needs the potential to cause serious harm if it does happen. That's a useful frame for scaffolders already used to treating every fall risk as non-negotiable, regardless of how rare an incident might seem.
Duties for small vs large PCBUs
Small PCBUs (fewer than 20 workers, for at least 9 months of the financial year) must manage critical risks and prioritise them across their other health and safety duties.
Large PCBUs (20+ workers) must manage all risks, critical and otherwise, but give critical risks the highest priority.
Many scaffolding businesses will sit in the small PCBU bracket. In practice, that means critical risks like fall protection, live edge protection and safe erection/dismantling sequences need to be front and centre of your systems, even if your broader risk register is lighter than a large contractor's.
ACOPs now carry real weight
Approved Codes of Practice (ACOPs) become a genuine safe harbour from 1 April 2027: if a PCBU follows an applicable ACOP, they're treated as having met their HSWA duty for that risk. Just as significant: industry groups, unions, worker representatives and sector bodies (not just WorkSafe) will be able to develop and submit their own ACOPs for Ministerial approval. That opens the door for scaffolding-specific codes, developed with real site experience, to carry the same legal weight as anything WorkSafe produces directly.
Overlapping legislation
Where a PCBU already complies with an equivalent requirement under another Act — the Building Act 2004, Maritime Transport Act 1994, or Land Transport Act 1998 are the examples WorkSafe gives — they'll be treated as having met the matching HSWA duty. Useful where scaffolding work crosses over with building consent requirements or transport regulations, so businesses aren't proving the same thing twice under two different laws.
Officer duties, tightened
Officer duties (directors, partners, board members, chief executives) are now clearly scoped to governance: understanding the PCBU's risks, making sure the right resources and processes exist, and verifying they're actually being used. That's separate from what the same person does day-to-day as a worker. For owner-operator scaffolding businesses where the director is also swinging tools on site, this distinction matters, governance duties and on-the-tools duties are no longer blurred together.
Recreational land use
Landowners will no longer owe a health and safety duty to people using their land recreationally, unless the activity connects to the PCBU's work or other work is happening at the same time and place. Less directly relevant to scaffolding operations, but worth knowing if your yard or a job site borders land with public access.
What doesn't change
The obligation to manage risk doesn't disappear just because a hazard isn't formally listed as critical. As SARNZ has noted, the responsibility to keep people safe hasn't moved, the real test is still whether someone could be seriously injured or killed if something goes wrong. If the answer is yes, it needs to be managed, Schedule 1A or not.
Between now and 1 April 2027
The current Act remains fully in force until commencement. WorkSafe has confirmed more detailed guidance is coming in the lead-up to the changeover. We'll keep tracking what it means for scaffolding as further detail lands, worth bookmarking if height safety is part of how you run your site.