UCL Research Proposal Example: Chemical technician to hazardous substances policy (Score 93)

This proposal asks: to what extent do current UK occupational exposure limit (OEL) standards for hazardous substances reflect available toxicological evidence, and does enforcement discretion produce systematic variation in compliance outcomes across sectors? Post-Brexit, the UK retained REACH-derived substance classifications but diverged on update cycles. HSE enforcement data and OEL revision histories suggest a lag between new toxicological findings and binding thresholds — a gap with occupational health consequences not yet examined through a regulatory-legal lens. Two bodies of scholarship bear on this question. Risk-regulation literature — drawing on Baldwin, Cave and Lodge's regulatory design framework — examines how standard-setting bodies translate scientific uncertainty into enforceable rules, but rarely engages with substance-specific toxicological data. Occupational health law scholarship, including work on the COSHH Regulations 2002, analyses enforcement structures without testing whether thresholds track evidence. The gap is methodological: no study has combined OEL revision timelines with HSE enforcement outcome data to test whether evidentiary lag predicts compliance variation. Phase 1 (months 1–4): Documentary analysis of HSE's EH40 OEL revision records for 30–40 substances, coding each revision against the date of the underlying toxicological review. Phase 2 (months 5–8): Freedom of Information requests to HSE for sector-disaggregated enforcement notices (2015–2024), constructing a dataset linking substance, sector, and enforcement action. Phase 3 (months 9–11): Qualitative regulatory analysis of HSE guidance and COSHH Approved Codes of Practice to identify where enforcement discretion is formally permitted. Phase 4 (month 12): Synthesis and policy memo. All sources are document-based and publicly available, fitting a one-year MSc timeline. All primary sources are public or FOI-accessible; no human participants are involved, so ethical risk is low. The main constraint is FOI response time; a 30-working-day statutory deadline is built into Phase 2, with a contingency of using published HSE Annual Statistics if disaggregated data are withheld. The substance sample is deliberately bounded to ensure coding depth within twelve months. UCL Laws' regulatory law research cluster, which includes publicly listed work on risk regulation and administrative law, provides the supervisory environment this project requires. Bentham House library holdings and UCL's institutional FOI support are the primary resources needed.