Employees vulnerable as inspections cut
From Big Issue in the North magazine
Safety campaigners fear Vincent Cable’s new policy to exempt many businesses from health and safety inspections will increase the number of employees being killed at work.
Last September Cable, the business secretary, said shops, offices and pubs would be excluded from inspections, claiming it would reduce business costs.
He has now followed this up with a statutory code that explicity outlaws proactive inspections by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in all but ‘high risk areas.’
Sectors exempt
This follows cuts in inspections in other sectors including what the government called low-risk manufacturing in 2011.
Cable said the changes are necessary because “removing unnecessary red tape and putting common sense back into health and safety will reduce fears and costs for businesses. This will give them the confidence to create more jobs and support the wider economy to grow.”
Hazards magazine, which describes itself as ‘independent, union-friendly,’ estimates there are now 37 sectors that are exempt from unannounced preventive HSE inspections. They include docks, bricks, road haulage, quarries and courier services.
Farming is now classed as a “non-major hazard” industry where “proactive inspection is no longer considered a useful component of future inventions” even though agriculture is the most dangerous sector to work in.
Despite comprising just 1.4% of the UK workforce it accounts for around a fifth of workplace deaths. Thirty people have so far been killed in Britain’s green fields in 2012-13.
A recent Stirling University study found that, if construction was excluded, that three-quarters of those killed from April 2011 to October 2012 were in sectors not subject to unannounced HSE inspections.
Campaigner Hilda Palmer of the Greater Manchester Hazards Centre said: “There are international studies showing businesses, communities and taxpayers all lose out if people are killed, injured or made ill by work.
Injuries
“The Safe Work Australian policy setting government body reported last year that employers could get a £2bn boost to productivity by reducing injuries and illnesses. That would be the equivalent of a £6bn boost here.”
According to Safe Work Australia the boost to businesses would be dwarfed by gains to the injured that bear 74% of the costs with their local communities a further 21%.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the US agency charged with preventing work-related illnesses and injuries, last year calculated the annual direct and indirect costs to the US economy of occupational illnesses and injury to be $250bn. The Leigh study was the largest inquiry of its kind and excluded employer costs for staff turnover, retraining and hiring, and also diseases of the nervous system.
The HSE records the costs of workplace deaths, injuries and illnesses at £13.4 billion a year, excluding occupational cancer.
Hazards believes that the overall economic cost to the UK of workplace deaths, injuries at work, occupational cancers and asbestos deaths – which are currently averaging 4,000 a year - is close to £60bn.
“Cable’s strategy is short-sighted and guaranteed to increase businesses costs whilst failing to protect people from death, serious injury and workplace illnesses,” said Palmer. “It is immoral.”
The phrase, “giving the criminals the keys to our jails”, springs to mind but this goes well beyond that. Governments that give criminals by association, access not only to the jails, law courts, prosecution council and jury but also our actual law making procedures cannot be classed as governments. They are abdicating their responsibilities to others and worse than a mafia. This abandoning of democratic governmental responsibility, goes well beyond even the naïve middle class liberal do-gooders, self-policing anarchistic philosophies of life. It gives the rights to the worst and most dangerous of criminal elements in society to control and undermine the interests of ordinary people, responsible businesses and organisations. Such lack of supervision and controls will allow and indeed attract the most irresponsible into organisations (private and public) at a time when they have lost the respect of normal people, who see them as at best incompetent at worse, thugs and crooks in white shirts or blouses. Organisation (private and public) need to regain respect and trust they have lost, changing laws and controls to allow even worse behavior from them to appear legitimate and unchallengeable, will do the opposite. Allowing even more freedom for organisations to behave in any way they wish behave (incompetently, cover-up failures, lie, cheat, create ill-health, injury and death) at the expense of draconian controls over vulnerable individuals is not a way forward. It is a backward step in civilization that cannot be tolerated. How can any government do this to those it was elect to protect let alone one that shouts its support for law and order and pledges to protect ordinary people?
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