Health and Safety at Work

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on securing a debate on this important but often neglected subject. I shall take a slightly longer view of health and safety at work in the UK. That is partly because I had the privilege of being in at the beginning of the Health and Safety Executive and Commission in 1975 but also because it is easy to forget now what a deep and successful change of culture there has been. As forerunners to the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, which set the framework for this change of culture, I pick out two key strands. The first is that, like most effective revolutions, the Act built on and transformed previous trends, from the first factory inspectors in 1833, one of Lord Shaftesbury’s many reforms to address the downside of the industrial revolution, to the piecemeal legislation of the postwar period. Reform had other powerful advocates. Charles Dickens caricatured the employers’ association of the day as the ““Society for Mangling Operatives””. But the second strand was an adverse one. Before 1975, responsibility for health and safety in some of the most dangerous industries was held by the sponsoring department for each occupational sector, thus mining safety and nuclear safety were with the Department of Energy, and agricultural health and safety with MAFF, as it then was. Six government departments had responsibilities for heath and safety at work. To lodge the initiative for prosecution and the pressure to invest perhaps quite a lot of money to save lives with the sponsoring department is to set something of a disincentive for vigorous and independent action. When I was given responsibility for gas safety, newly acquired from the Department of Energy, prosecutions in the gas supply industry under any workplace health and safety legislation were a complete rarity. When it was proposed that all these responsibilities should be integrated in one agency, there was all-party support in Parliament, apart from in respect of agricultural workers, where in your Lordships’ House, the predecessors of Members opposite did not think that farm labourers should have the same health and safety protection as everyone else; and there was a fair degree of Whitehall opposition. The emergence of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 was indeed a victory. What was so good about it? As my noble friend Lord Brookman said, it is an empowering Act. It set up an agency, independent of departments, to further workpeople’s right to reasonable protection from accidents and ill health at work through a general duty on their employer, and it extended this right for the first time to all workpeople. It gave inspectors new and flexible sanctions on their behalf. It gave workpeople a right for the first time to information about the risks they faced and it gave their representatives rights to pursue their health and safety without victimisation, forever constructively altering the balance of power in the workplace. My noble friend Lady Turner was responsible for one of the provisions to achieve that. The structure of the agency was, at the time, innovatory. It had and still has a commission, appointed from representatives of those affected by workplace risk, trades unionists, employers, representatives of the public, whose safety was also covered in the legislation, which could make decisions at arm’s length from the Ministers who account for it to Parliament. Of all the so-called corporatist institutions of the 1970s, it has probably stood the test of time best and survived intact. It also had the good fortune of a tradition of inspectors of high calibre and dedication, able to use their considerable discretion with professional judgment. As my right honourable friend Michael Foot said when defending HSE against cuts by the government of 1989,"““magnificent people who serve the community and industry””." The Health and Safety Commission and Executive structure is a model of its kind. It is copied all over the world. It is influential in the casting of European legislation, which is greatly to the advantage of the UK. What has it achieved for our people? Between 1974 and 2005, death at work fell by 76 per cent, and accidents by 67 per cent. As my noble friend Lord Harrison said, in 1974 there were 651 deaths and well over 300,000 accidents. Last year there were 159 deaths and just over 100,000 accidents—a huge reduction, my Lords. In Europe, as my noble friend said, only Sweden has a lesser toll of workplace accidents, and it has a less complex and more modern economy. It would be right to say that the decline and automation of heavy industry has also had an effect. But, also, new science-based industries, greatly adding to our prosperity, have been brought into being within a safety framework which ensured they could prosper without scandal, shock and banning—such as in the expansion of the chemical industry, potentially very dangerous. But this level of security has brought its own problems. Since death, injury and disease are no longer an inexorable part of the routine pursuit of earning a living, people feel they have a right to absolute safety, which is simply not available. The nature of risk is often poorly understood, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, has suggested. Towards the end of my time in HSE we wanted to estimate what would be a tolerable risk from nuclear power installations. We had some difficulty in getting HSE’s distinguished scientists to explain the options in lay language so that the public could give informed consent. I should be interested in what my noble friend can tell us about HSE’s approach to this dilemma now, particularly since HSE has just been asked to estimate the safety of various energy sources. Health and safety at work in the UK has a good system. What still remains to be done in the system? True justice means making every agent with power over life and death at work appropriately responsible, initially for preventing tragedies, but if that has failed, responsible for being called to account in a court of law. There is a gap here. There is as yet no offence of corporate manslaughter. It was a manifesto commitment. We have a draft Bill, eminently suitable for pre-legislative scrutiny, as should any Bill be which creates a significant new offence. What is the timetable for getting it on to the statute book?