Nightmare! especially for those travelling economy.
Short haul it's the number of bags that's the problem, not so much the weight; on ET the limit was always 23kg so won't change, and on CE you can now in theory take 2 x 23 = 46kg instead of 30kg. But I often used to check two small bags instead of one large one, particularly now with the silly ex-UK hand luggage rules. Or if coming back with a purchase that isn't particularly heavy but can't be counted as hand luggage. (Or is liquid, like the 5 litres of our gardener's olive oil which I bring back each time I visit our place in Italy
). Now everything has to be in the one case.
Long haul economy fares just effectively go up by £60 or whatever they want to charge (extra cost of the inevitable second bag). I've been lucky enough to be able to have avoided Y long-haul for as long as I can remember, but do the one-bag rules apply to WT+ as well?
And long haul premium fares also go up by £60 if you want to take more than 46kg (3 x 23 would take you up to the old 2 x 32).
And health and safety my a***. Look at places like Sweden etc where their H&S legislation is much more draconian than ours, and 32kg is no problem for them. I have a Swedish friend who sells lifting devices - hand-operated fork-lift-truck type things designed for specific applications - and he's always amazed at what they let people do in the UK. He's never seen people pushing those horizontal stacks of 50-100 trolleys around an airport by hand except in the Third World - most sensible airports provide little ride-on electric pushing-things for that. I'm sure that if a sensible assessment was done of how the handlers lift the luggage - it isn't the weight, it's how and at what angle etc you lift it - they could solve the problem.