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Lord Brett: My Lords, I, too, appreciate the endeavours of the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, in securing this debate and putting this important issue before us. I declare two interests. First, as the director of the International Labour Organisation for the United Kingdom and Ireland, I represent an organisation which sets international standards in the area of health and safety as well as in many others. As the general secretary for a decade of then Institution of Professionals, Managers and Specialists—now Prospect—I represented a union which has some 95 per cent of the professional and technical staff of the Health and Safety Executive in its membership. In that decade, indeed before that, I learnt to appreciate the integrity, the skill and the dedication that exist at all levels of the Health and Safety Executive.
Being the eighth person to speak in this debate, I knew in advance that much would have been said, most of it rather more eloquently than could I and certainly with greater expertise. It allows me the luxury of being able to agree with those who have spoken previously. I certainly agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker. I, too, am old enough to remember 1974, 1975 and 1976, the bringing-about of the valuable 1974 Act and the creation of the Health and Safety Executive, of which I have been an unashamed fan for the past 30 years. I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Christopher, about partnership in industry, particularly in industries which have a track record. You do not have to make the trade union case or the case for safety; it makes itself as a good company policy. Therefore, by joining together in
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partnership, you can improve both the safety and health of the employees and the well-being of the company.
I agree with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, said, and I also share one of his concerns, which is a reduction of the inspection in the workplace. During the 1990s, as the general secretary of the union concerned, I experienced a whole raft of cuts across departments in the Civil Service. They were indiscriminate. The cuts were made to make economies—I am not making a party political point—but it meant that they were imposed on the Health and Safety Executive without too much regard for the damage that they were doing. The incoming Government in 1997 have taken a whole series of initiatives, all to be welcomed—many of them of great value—but the truth is that they have not restored the regime which, in the 1980s, provided for an expectation of an inspection in the workplace every four years, but which, in the 1990s, drifted out to one every eight years. It is not, to put it kindly, drifting back.
Statistics produced by the HSE show the number of prosecutions, convictions, fines and enforcement notices. We have seen a trend of those numbers going down in the past year. This could be due to more effective management or better targeting. One of my favourite series of books is the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Noble Lords will recall a dog that doesn't bark. The dog that doesn't bark here is the fact that I have not seen statistics about the number of inspections that have taken place. Therefore, is this reduction in prosecutions, convictions and enforcement notices due to a smaller number of inspections?
Like the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, and others I am concerned about what has happened to the nature of the British workplace in the past 15 years. Some will say, "Ah, well, much of British industry—20 per cent—disappeared in the 1980s and a lot of manufacturing has gone in the past 10 years. Therefore, there are fewer reasons to have inspections; there are fewer places to inspect". That is not true. The decline has been the large industries, which were well organised in terms of health and safety and where safety representatives and management worked together. They were centres of high safety standards. Having served for the past 15 years on the governing body and as a director of the ILO, I pay tribute to the UK Government, because they have during the past 20 years established the United Kingdom as setting very high standards for health and safety worldwide. The example that we have set has been carried by British multinationals—to the credit of many of them—into developing countries and it has raised health and safety standards there more rapidly than would have been the case had domestic legislation in those countries had been relied on.
At home, what has happened? Big companies have demerged. We have seen a rash of outsourcing, whether we talk about the rail network or major multinationals. We outsource transport; we outsource
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everything from computing to HR services to grounds maintenance. That means that a lot of sub-contractors are employed. Many of them are small and trying to survive. If you talk to them about regulation, be it taxation, VAT or health and safety, they will complain of a burden of red tape. Therefore, they either do not know or do not want to know, in many cases, which regulations exist to which they should adhere. This is true in the case of health and safety. While prosecutions, fines and enforcement are important, they are the endgame.
They are the tip of the iceberg. The real iceberg is the routine inspections, which not only find out what is wrong, but also advise companies on how to put things right and set them priorities. Small companies have to make priorities. Therefore, the advice, which is not that often sought, but which is available from an inspection, is of great value not only to the workers, but also to the employers. The fear is that a good employer, which is struggling to start up as a contractor or a sub-contractor, will not necessarily seek that advice. If the employer does not receive a visit from an inspector, it is not necessarily available.
The rogue employer—sadly, many of them are about, particularly in construction sub-contracting and some other areas—can be confident that the chance of routine inspection is almost like winning the lottery. The employer will say, "Therefore, we don't have to care because we've got a long chance. When they come along, we say, 'Mea culpa'.". But before the "mea culpa", we may see the accidents and the deaths of workers. Therefore, it is important to ask how, in this more fragmented world, we can ensure that we have an adequate inspection regime, so that inspections take place not only when we have a major accident, but to prevent those accidents, major and minor, that occur far too often, particularly, as the noble Lord, Lord Christopher, said, in the construction industry. Therefore, I would be supportive, as I have been for many years, of the HSE. I know that it would wisely use resources, but my particular concern is about the inspection regime.
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Lord Tunnicliffe: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, for initiating this debate. Before I start, I declare my interest as chairman of the Rail Safety and Standards Board. I will speak about the risk to the safety, not health, of workers and the public in general. I was urged to speak in this debate because of my experience with the subject. I was 25 years in aviation, including 10 as an airline pilot. I was for 12 years the managing director of London Underground—I joined shortly after the King's Cross tragedy. For two years, I was chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, and for three years I have been chairman of the Rail Safety and Standards Board, an organisation that is devoted to improving safety in the rail industry and to bringing the various parties together. I have a lot of experience, but I wonder whether I have wisdom. My increasing
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lack of certainty in recent years about the right answers leads me to some ideas that I would like to share with your Lordships today.
I was introduced to the dilemmas of safety as a student when I was being taught to fly. My instructor said to me, "The key to air safety, Denis, is to lock the hangar door and throw away the key; after that, we take risks". The fact that risk is part of life comes home to you very early as a pilot. When I became managing director of London Underground and realised that I was responsible for an organisation that killed between five and 15 passengers a year, the whole issue of risk and personal responsibility suddenly came to me very firmly. Your reaction is to say that these deaths should not happen and that we must do what we can to stop them. Very rapidly, you start seeing yourself spending millions and millions of pounds making the organisation safer.
Relatively rapidly, however, you realise that you could spend an infinite amount of money on making the organisation safe and that society simply cannot afford it. You are forced to the painful decision that the value of preventing a fatality is actually finite. Indeed, there is an acceptance of this fact among safety professionals—the current figure is about £1.5 million per fatality prevented, which aligns quite closely with the National Institute for Clinical Excellence figure of £30,000 to £50,000 per quality life year. Of course, you do not come by this figure—it is called the willingness-to-pay figure—by asking people whether they would die for £1.5 million, because the answer would clearly be no. What you do is observe their behaviours and the incremental risks that they take in their everyday lives, be it from crossing the road, from driving a car after having a drink—not above the limit—from speeding, from our love affair with transport and from all the incremental risks that we take with our lives to gratify our needs.
We are in the dilemma of proportionality or balance—a dilemma that this House faces over and over again when looking at legislation. When it comes to safety at work and safety to the public, we are constantly trying to make this balance. There are two current solutions. One is prescription, which works remarkably well. In aviation, you do not decide how to make your airline safe; you do it the way you are told. There are international standards for constructing and operating aeroplanes and for licensing engineers and pilots. Similarly, the Fire Precautions Act 1971 tells you what to do. It is fairly prescriptive: you just obey the Act and you are deemed to have done enough on behalf of society to protect people from death and injury. The Road Traffic Acts are a suite of rules which are there to prevent death and injury.
The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 is quite different. It introduces the concept of the duty holder and the concept of reducing risk to as low as reasonably practical. The duty holder must make the decision and only on that decision will the Health and Safety Executive or the Health and Safety Commission decide whether the actions are sufficient. Nevertheless, the Health and Safety Commission and the Health and Safety Executive, working with the 1974 Act, have had
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stunning and powerful success, as other noble Lords have said, in bringing about great improvement and safety in most of industry and to railway passengers. Indeed, I think that many of us involved were quite comfortable about how the Act was operating, at least until around the turn of the century. At that point, the HSE produced the document Reducing Risks, Protecting People, whose aim was to help us to understand how to use the Act. The problem was that that brought in so much precaution and so many new risks—particularly the new risk of societal concern, which I still have trouble seeing as anything more than what was read on the front page of the Daily Mail after an accident—that it introduced the whole phenomenon of risk aversion.
Risk aversion is generally powered by poor decision-making among employers. Nevertheless, the uncertainty in the Act feeds that risk aversion and poor decision-making. In turn, that poor decision-making causes costs and delays, damages operational performance and inhibits innovation. Worst of all, it creates derision. Sadly, "health and safety" is a phrase of derision in far too many places in our society, which actually reduces safety and causes accidents.
One way round that problem is to have excellent safety leadership, of which we have heard one or two examples today. A business with excellent safety leadership is a very special business—at every level, from chairman, chief executive, directors and everywhere in the management chain through to the trade union partnership, safety is part of all decision-making. If you can achieve that, you can continue to achieve the balance. Sadly, many firms are too small or they take the view, "It won't happen to us", or they try to solve the problem by bad, risk-averse decisions. That leads to a sub-optimal position, with a lack of safety leadership and of clear regulation, which in turn leads to cost and/or risk.
I reluctantly come to the view that we will have to bring certainty back into the equation. I believe that the certainty that we see in aviation or in fire regulations—modern, up-to-date, fit-for-purpose, sensible certainty—has to be part of the ongoing solution. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the HSE have done a brilliant job, but I am no longer convinced that they are fit for purpose. We should have a root-and-branch review of the Act. There certainly needs to be a widespread public debate, which needs take account of the partnership between the employer, workers and the public. At the end of the day, we need a set of laws and ways of enforcing them that are clear at all levels in our society. I believe that that certainty, with fit-for-purpose regulation, will bring better results in cost and safety for all members of our society.
12.48 pm
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