Health and Safety at Work

Baroness Turner of Camden Excerpts

Monday 4th April 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, I am pleased that my noble friend has introduced a debate on this subject and I thank him for doing so. Some time ago, we had a debate on a report undertaken by the noble Lord, Lord Young. He is of course no longer the PM’s chief adviser but the Government are apparently still committed to introducing legislation arising from that report. Presumably, this paper from the DWP is part of that policy. I recall saying at the time that if legislation emerged designed to make it more difficult for employees to make claims because of illness or injuries at work, I would do everything I could to oppose it, and that is still my position.

There is apparently a notion that health and safety provision in the UK is the best in the world and that very few people are hurt at work. Unfortunately, that is not true. There are many hazardous occupations, some of which have been referred to by my noble friend Lord McKenzie in his introduction today. Up to 1,500 people are killed every year in work-related accidents and millions are made ill by work-related illnesses. Furthermore, arising from the report of the noble Lord, Lord Young—although this was not maintained in the report itself—the Government, including the Prime Minister, claim that in this country we are suffering from a compensation culture. They say that health and safety costs too much and that there is too much regulation which prevents a growth in jobs, particularly in the private sector. Much of that is not accurate. Less than 10 per cent of workers made ill or injured at work get any sort of compensation at all.

There is actually less regulation now than there was 40 years ago. There are also fewer spot inspections of workplaces, fewer prosecutions and in 98 per cent of major injuries there is no enforcement action taken later by the employers concerned. The Health and Safety Executive has done a very good job over the years on improving health and safety at work, but that is all changing as a result of government cuts. There is a 35 per cent cut in government funds to the HSE which is to take full effect by 2015. As a result, the HSE is now finalising plans to turn into a slim-line, pay-as-you-go enforcement agency that charges for everything, from enforcement notices to routine advice and accident investigations. There is now a voluntary exit scheme which has apparently been oversubscribed, with 250 applicants for redundancy among HSE staff. Enforcement is already in crisis. The number of inspections is to fall and proactive inspections may be abandoned altogether.

In the mean time, the Government are also planning to change the way in which European directives on health and safety eventually become part of UK law. Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, who chairs the Cabinet's Reducing Regulation Committee made it clear that the Government intend to end much regulation so that British business is not put at a disadvantage. It is clear that the Government intend to move to weaker laws and, of course, less protection for British workers. That is dangerous and quite unwarranted. If the Prime Minister is genuinely concerned about the big society and encouraging voluntary organisations, he should be aware that the families of workers who have been killed and injured in work-related incidents have formed themselves into an organisation called Families Against Corporate Killers and are campaigning for tougher laws against what they believe to be preventable illnesses and deaths and for the HSE to have more powers rather than fewer.

The TUC also supports the campaign for improved enforcement. In confidential interviews, many managers and staff have said that they fear reprisals if they raise safety concerns at work, despite the fact that the Labour Government introduced legislation designed to protect whistleblowers. Unions have exposed the scandal of the under-reporting of safety concerns. From the information provided to me, it seems that far from having a compensation culture, there is actually too little reporting of hazards in employment. The TUC is taking that very seriously. There is no doubt that workplaces are safer where unions are recognised and safety representatives are able to do their work. Moreover, union members are more likely to get help if they need to take a case to court because the unions will support cases in order to assist their members.

There is a Workers' Memorial Day, with a rally in Manchester, on 28 April, in memory of those who have died from work-related accidents and to press for a strengthening of enforcement and opposition to the Government’s cuts drive, which will put more employees at risk, and which will involve the NHS and taxpayers in the expense of dealing with the problems that workers encounter because they need attention, benefits and assistance from the NHS. Sometimes employers manage to escape altogether because they do not always carry insurance. I remember that this was another issue that we raised some time ago; the previous Government had undertaken to deal with it, but it does not seem to bother the existing Government very much.

In a number of ways, the Government seem intent on changing the balance between employers and employees to the disadvantage of employees. The Government may very well live to regret that. I have recently had some correspondence from a lady who is very active in the voluntary organisation to which I referred. She is the mother of a son who died in a rather appalling accident at work. She has drawn my attention to the fact that the Prime Minister said, prior to the election:

“So let me make it clear: yes, the Conservatives will reduce the burden and impact of health and safety legislation in our country”,

to which she responds:

“David Cameron’s government intends removing the ‘burden’ on employers of safeguarding their employees, but the real emotional and financial burden is borne by the families of up to 1,500 killed every year by preventable accidents at work”.

That is a very important statement from somebody who has really suffered as a result of inadequate protection in the past. We certainly do not want to make it any worse than it is at present.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

The noble Lord has not mentioned trade unions once and yet this is a major part of all unions’ work. For many years it was one of my responsibilities within my union to run a scheme that provided assistance to people who had accidents at work. The TUC is very much involved with the prevention of accidents and so on and it is a major part of unions’ work. The Minister did not mention that. Although he referred to the register of people who are giving professional advice and so on, he did not mention unions at all.

[Lord Freud]

I apologise. That was an inadvertent miss-out. Clearly where there is a more responsive, not so proactive system, the unions would have a role in alerting the HSE where there were concerns. Clearly, the role of education and training in reducing health problems in many of these areas will be important.

One area in which I am most interested is what we will find from the sickness absence review. This has now been launched and will be looking at periods of sickness absence of 28 weeks. Stress-related and mental health-related issues account for around 40 per cent of such absence, and it will be very interesting to see whether we can use the new arrangements for managing sickness absence to ratchet up how employers look after their staff. I know that the sickness absence review team is actively looking at that. Therefore, there is a health and not just a safety angle here.