Health and Safety: Common Sense Common Safety

Lord German Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord German]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Young for his report and, in particular, for the wide range of aspects that it covers because of the range of interests that have to be accommodated in this very complex process, which needs to be simpler. A good health and safety regime must be able to get the balance right, and it is that balance that I will talk about first. Two watchwords that have been mentioned already are protection and proportion: the need to protect people in the workplace and to provide a proportionate response to risk. Getting the balance right between risk and the cost of precaution is the important challenge for us all.

Of course, saving lives and preventing injury must be in the forefront of everything that we do. In practice, as we all know, many people are getting the balance wrong. We have heard indications of that this morning. Some people are going too far, which leads to the sort of myths that we have regularly heard about and seen. We have just heard about pancakes. I suspect that many noble Lords will remember the story about mortarboards. Metro reported that students on graduation were not allowed to throw their mortarboards into the air, for fear that the sharp points might damage their heads when they came down. Just this month, the Liverpool Daily Post reported that potted plants would not be permitted because they were a health hazard. On the other hand, although these are myths, people are still being hurt in easily preventable accidents because not enough has been done to ensure safety. We need to draw the right balance.

I am very glad that my noble friend stated that the problem is not health and safety legislation, but its application and interpretation. He said that, alas, he could not find a problem with European legislation, and I hope that he and his colleagues will take that to heart. It is not European legislation but perhaps its transposition to the UK that is sometimes at fault. The noble Lord, Lord Bhattacharyya, talked about gold plating. Sometimes we have difficulty identifying gold plating in legislation that has been transposed. Are we providing a belt and braces or adding extra things that do not need to be there? Perhaps the Minister will comment on these issues.

My one concern about the report is the emphasis that it places firmly and primarily on the demands and pressures that health and safety legislation imposes on business. I would have preferred a report in which first principles were laid out: a discussion at the head of the report laying out the key issues, such as the purpose of such legislation and how we achieve a proportionate response. One thing missing, I find, is an indication of how many opportunities are lost in life as a result of the legislation—in particular, the play opportunities for young people, many of which have been lost because of health and safety concerns. These overarching issues are raised in the report, so it is a matter of emphasis and where they occur. I welcome the fact that the report covers the issues, but the emphasis is strongly on business, which unbalances the detailed arguments.

I agree that, in that balance, there must be a smaller burden on small and medium-sized enterprises. The compensation culture, with its no-win, no-fee cheques, must be curbed, but we must balance this with a life and injury-saving safety culture in all places of work. Worker safety is a serious matter that risks being trivialised by the often-quoted tales, some of which I referred to just now, which are reported frequently in the media and often turn out to be absolute myths.

However, as with many aspects of life and society—and the noble Lord said this at the outset—perception is all. Perception of a compensation culture has made business fearful of being sued. That perception has been fuelled by aggressive advertising and, for example, by those firms that make it their business to scan road traffic accident and court reports so that they can approach the injured party to seek business. I have no idea how successful such firms are in getting business, but it is clear to me that, if such approaches did not provide an income for claims firms and the associated legal companies that take on the cases, those firms would not engage in this sort of cold-canvass advertising, so there must be a profit in it. The recommendation to which the noble Lord referred for a simplified system for personal injuries in accidents of this sort is very much to be welcomed.

I want to touch on a couple of specific issues. The first concerns training for consultants. It is very important that we provide a qualification structure for those who work in this area. One of the consequences of having a partly unqualified workforce in this area is that people who are unqualified are likely to say, “Let’s strip out all risk from the workplace”, when in fact that is not quite straightforward and it is certainly not the intention behind the legislation.

Secondly, I want to say one or two words of caution about combining local authority health and safety and food safety inspectors. I draw on my experience of the E. coli outbreak in south Wales last year and the subsequent Pennington review, which made it quite clear that there were major faults in the food safety regime. I want to make sure that we do not lose those sorts of skills by combining functions.

Overall, however, I welcome the report. The challenge for the Government now must be to produce a well-rounded response—I am sure that they will do so—that looks beyond the report’s emphasis on the cost to business and takes a wide perspective on the issues raised as a whole. Therefore, when the Minister comes to sum up the debate, I would welcome his views on the need for a multifocused response.