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Baroness Whitaker: My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on securing a debate on this important but often neglected subject. I shall take a slightly longer view of health and safety at work in the UK. That is partly because I had the privilege of being in at the beginning of the Health and Safety Executive and Commission in 1975 but also because it is easy to forget now what a deep and successful change of culture there has been.
As forerunners to the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, which set the framework for this change of culture, I pick out two key strands. The first is that, like most effective revolutions, the Act built on and transformed previous trends, from the first factory inspectors in 1833, one of Lord Shaftesbury's many reforms to address the downside of the industrial revolution, to the piecemeal legislation of the postwar period. Reform had other powerful advocates. Charles Dickens caricatured the employers' association of the day as the "Society for Mangling Operatives".
But the second strand was an adverse one. Before 1975, responsibility for health and safety in some of the most dangerous industries was held by the sponsoring department for each occupational sector, thus mining safety and nuclear safety were with the Department of Energy, and agricultural health and safety with MAFF, as it then was. Six government departments had responsibilities for heath and safety at work. To lodge the initiative for prosecution and the pressure to invest perhaps quite a lot of money to save lives with the sponsoring department is to set something of a disincentive for vigorous and independent action. When I was given responsibility for gas safety, newly acquired from the Department of
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Energy, prosecutions in the gas supply industry under any workplace health and safety legislation were a complete rarity.
When it was proposed that all these responsibilities should be integrated in one agency, there was all-party support in Parliament, apart from in respect of agricultural workers, where in your Lordships' House, the predecessors of Members opposite did not think that farm labourers should have the same health and safety protection as everyone else; and there was a fair degree of Whitehall opposition. The emergence of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 was indeed a victory.
What was so good about it? As my noble friend Lord Brookman said, it is an empowering Act. It set up an agency, independent of departments, to further workpeople's right to reasonable protection from accidents and ill health at work through a general duty on their employer, and it extended this right for the first time to all workpeople. It gave inspectors new and flexible sanctions on their behalf. It gave workpeople a right for the first time to information about the risks they faced and it gave their representatives rights to pursue their health and safety without victimisation, forever constructively altering the balance of power in the workplace. My noble friend Lady Turner was responsible for one of the provisions to achieve that. The structure of the agency was, at the time, innovatory. It had and still has a commission, appointed from representatives of those affected by workplace risk, trades unionists, employers, representatives of the public, whose safety was also covered in the legislation, which could make decisions at arm's length from the Ministers who account for it to Parliament. Of all the so-called corporatist institutions of the 1970s, it has probably stood the test of time best and survived intact. It also had the good fortune of a tradition of inspectors of high calibre and dedication, able to use their considerable discretion with professional judgment. As my right honourable friend Michael Foot said when defending HSE against cuts by the government of 1989,
The Health and Safety Commission and Executive structure is a model of its kind. It is copied all over the world. It is influential in the casting of European legislation, which is greatly to the advantage of the UK. What has it achieved for our people?
Between 1974 and 2005, death at work fell by 76 per cent, and accidents by 67 per cent. As my noble friend Lord Harrison said, in 1974 there were 651 deaths and well over 300,000 accidents. Last year there were 159 deaths and just over 100,000 accidents—a huge reduction, my Lords. In Europe, as my noble friend said, only Sweden has a lesser toll of workplace accidents, and it has a less complex and more modern economy. It would be right to say that the decline and automation of heavy industry has also had an effect. But, also, new science-based industries, greatly adding to our prosperity, have been brought into being within a safety framework which ensured they could prosper
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without scandal, shock and banning—such as in the expansion of the chemical industry, potentially very dangerous.
But this level of security has brought its own problems. Since death, injury and disease are no longer an inexorable part of the routine pursuit of earning a living, people feel they have a right to absolute safety, which is simply not available. The nature of risk is often poorly understood, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, has suggested. Towards the end of my time in HSE we wanted to estimate what would be a tolerable risk from nuclear power installations. We had some difficulty in getting HSE's distinguished scientists to explain the options in lay language so that the public could give informed consent. I should be interested in what my noble friend can tell us about HSE's approach to this dilemma now, particularly since HSE has just been asked to estimate the safety of various energy sources.
Health and safety at work in the UK has a good system. What still remains to be done in the system? True justice means making every agent with power over life and death at work appropriately responsible, initially for preventing tragedies, but if that has failed, responsible for being called to account in a court of law. There is a gap here. There is as yet no offence of corporate manslaughter. It was a manifesto commitment. We have a draft Bill, eminently suitable for pre-legislative scrutiny, as should any Bill be which creates a significant new offence. What is the timetable for getting it on to the statute book?
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Lord Christopher: My Lords, I join my colleagues in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, for this debate. Workers in Britain should probably be more grateful to him, because it is clearly a major issue. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Lea, will be able to persuade some unions to publish an analysis of this debate in union journals. It is as well that they know that some parliamentarians are interested and concerned about the problem.
It is all too easy to generalise about health and safety and accidents at work, because different organisations vary so much. Several people have mentioned the construction industry. That was imprinted in my memory in the late 1980s, when I was asked to represent the TUC at a memorial service at a church in London for construction workers who had died in the previous 12 months. Sadly, I cannot remember the exact number, but I went along assuming that it was for the workers who had died in Britain. In fact, it was some 30 or 40 workers who had died in London. This brought home to me just how serious this industry can be. It is notoriously difficult to deal with because of the large turnover of workers, distant sites, time-limited contracts, loose materials and tools lying about, and often poor supervision—although it is fair to say that this is not exclusively an employer problem. For some reason construction workers, perhaps through familiarity, seem unwilling to do a great deal about following the rules. To all this is now added a language difficulty, because of the many European workers now
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in construction. This industry calls for special attention and some analysis of how we can best improve the situation. The general rules that might apply in your Lordships' House certainly would not work there.
The other industry that has been mentioned which is extremely difficult is farming. It is not just a question of one man and his dog; really it is one man and his machine, or one woman and an agitated heifer. How you convey on a regular basis the need to be careful and warnings about particular machinery and accidents with large animals, I am not sure. But it would be useful if Defra and the NFU could from time to time convey to those in the industry what the issues are, and what has been learnt from what has happened.
What might be of more general application for consideration are good examples of work that is being done in the right direction. Perhaps I can assist my noble friend Lady Whitaker, because I want to say something about what has been done at British Nuclear Fuels. I declare my interest, of which most people are aware. I assure the House that BNF has not asked me to speak about this—I wanted to do so myself. This is an industry that works with nuclear materials, very heavy loads, gases, acids and chemicals. Work is done at heights and in radioactive conditions. One could hardly imagine a more difficult situation to deal with.
BNF's approach to health and safety has three strands: the conventional one—for example, trips, falls and occupational ill health; nuclear safety; and radioactive safety. It has intensive training on safety, and refresher training. If health and safety performance slips, immediate corrective action is triggered. In fact the chief executive, on appropriate occasions, will make personal inspections and examinations of what may have happened. There are safety stand-down days, if it is clear that in any area all is not as it should be, for whatever reason. Staff have refresher behavioural programmes.
I do not want to give a lot of figures, but the results have been remarkable over the past few years. The number of hours lost through accident or health and safety considerations in 2000–01 was 0.6 per 200,000 hours worked. By the middle of last year this figure had been reduced to 0.23 hours per 200,000 worked, which shows considerable progress in a situation that was already good. At Hunterston, which is a decommissioning and storage site, four years have passed without a lost-time accident. At Dungeness A, no lost-time accidents for 3 million hours of work have been recorded. Berkeley has received awards from RoSPA. Sizewell has won an international safety award.
What is there to learn from this? Two factors are involved, and other noble Lords touched on them. First, you need an employer which is dedicated, apart from to being a successful company, to health and safety. If it is dedicated to health and safety, it probably will be a successful company. Secondly, a measure of union ownership of the health and safety
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programme is necessary, as is the case at Sellafield and its sites. The chair of Sellafield's joint health and safety committee is a trade unionist and not a manager. For those noble Lords who are slightly doubtful about trade unions—most of them are not here today—I paraphrase Tony Hancock: not of all of us are out-of-sight Leftie Luddites. We are concerned about how we deal with these serious problems. They call for genuine trust and a genuine partnership between the unions and the employer. They have a common interest. Ownership of the job, I repeat, is important to all workers. We often seem to forget that. A bad accident rate loses contracts and livelihoods, as has been the case with those who were responsible for some of the railway tracks.
There is a damaging belief these days that only management can manage, and that money and pay are only things that matter. In all the surveys with which I was involved during my union career, pay was always second or third in importance. Rarely was it of first importance. The organisation and management of work was always among the top three issues.
We should call on the Government to search for other good examples. The noble Lord, Lord Harrison, mentioned some. We should consider with the CBI and the TUC how best to attain the safety successes which have been seen in certain industries. I hope that the Minister will say that something along these lines can be carried out.
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