Health and Safety: Common Sense Common Safety

Lord Haskel Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Haskel]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Young, has done us a great service by bringing a common-sense approach to the so-called compensation culture. Yes, it is long overdue. He has prescribed the right medicine for many of the symptoms but I wonder if he has really understood all the causes of the illness. Other noble Lords have suggested that the causes are greedy claims farmers and vulture lawyers—not, of course, the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, whom I congratulate on his maiden speech. Are there any other reasons? Could it be that pressure at work causes people to act unreasonably when something unfortunate happens? Is it that people fear that there is an imbalance between pressure at work and the reward—not just monetary but in satisfaction? Do people feel that they are victims of injustice at work and the system is against them, as my noble friend put it? The compensation culture could just be a way of getting their own back.

It is many years since I ran my business but I certainly do not forget how difficult it was to get the right balance between putting undue pressure on people and the need for progress. It is not easy to get creative tension right. I was reminded of this the other day when a booklet called Stress at Work arrived on my desk. It is a useful publication by the British Academy Policy Centre. My noble friend Lord Jordan also mentioned this. The British Academy is not the only one concerned about this. The Health and Safety Executive is also concerned. It has produced a formula for measuring stress at work. In 2004 the Health and Safety Executive produced a guide for managers on how to reduce stress at work. Its US equivalent says on its website:

“The workplace is the single greatest source of stress”.

We all know why people get stressed at work. There is the nature of their work, the pressures from above and below, the competition, the interpersonal conflicts, the bureaucracy and the distorted work-life balance. It now takes two incomes in a family to pay for a home. There is the pressure to stay connected when away from work. Many of us have been there; many of us in this Chamber know what it is all about. Some of us can get out of the kitchen if we do not like the heat, but for most of us that is impossible. We need the income and, yes, we also need some job satisfaction. We also know the economic cost of absenteeism, high staff turnover and poor performance, and the social costs to health and family relationships. Why not add the cost of excessive claims when an opportunity presents itself when something goes wrong? It is hard to make legal claims for stress but far easier to make them for physical injuries that are apparent. Why not double or triple them to include stress?

Is this an unreasonable analysis? I do not think it is. The situation will get worse. There will be much more part-time and temporary work instead of full-time jobs. There will be cuts to staff, with the rest loyally taking on the extra work. There will be the stress and conflict of redundancy. People will feel that they always have to be present, even when there is good reason to be absent. The economic crisis might not reduce absenteeism but it will certainly increase stress. If there is a connection between stress at work and the compensation culture, it will only increase with the recession. Certainly, the recommendations of the noble Lord, Lord Young, need to be implemented but surely, at the same time, measures to reduce stress at work need to be implemented by both the private and public sectors.

There is nothing new in this. As I have said, the Health and Safety Executive laid this out in 2004. Well before that, most people knew of the need to be fair, to give people more say at work, and to give people the opportunity to have control over their future and a say over change, either through their union or their representatives, as my noble friend Lady Turner said. There is a need to be more flexible and more family-friendly over working hours, and to design jobs so that they are less stressful. We must also ignore those who say that these soft management skills are pointless. Indeed, the Minister had better take note. His boss, the Prime Minister, is touching on this today when he speaks about measuring general well-being.

My question to the Minister is: does he agree with me that there is a connection between stress at work and the unreasonable demands of the compensation culture? If so, will the Government ensure that the Health and Safety Executive’s recommendations to managers are implemented in the public sector, where the Government are a major employer? I am sure that many public sector and private sector managers already do this; after all, it is common sense and good management practice. If this is done, hand in hand with the proposals of the noble Lord, Lord Young, we may avoid a lot of trouble, unhappiness and expense.