Health and Safety at Work

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, for initiating this debate. Before I start, I declare my interest as chairman of the Rail Safety and Standards Board. I will speak about the risk to the safety, not health, of workers and the public in general. I was urged to speak in this debate because of my experience with the subject. I was 25 years in aviation, including 10 as an airline pilot. I was for 12 years the managing director of London Underground—I joined shortly after the King’s Cross tragedy. For two years, I was chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, and for three years I have been chairman of the Rail Safety and Standards Board, an organisation that is devoted to improving safety in the rail industry and to bringing the various parties together. I have a lot of experience, but I wonder whether I have wisdom. My increasing lack of certainty in recent years about the right answers leads me to some ideas that I would like to share with your Lordships today. I was introduced to the dilemmas of safety as a student when I was being taught to fly. My instructor said to me, ““The key to air safety, Denis, is to lock the hangar door and throw away the key; after that, we take risks””. The fact that risk is part of life comes home to you very early as a pilot. When I became managing director of London Underground and realised that I was responsible for an organisation that killed between five and 15 passengers a year, the whole issue of risk and personal responsibility suddenly came to me very firmly. Your reaction is to say that these deaths should not happen and that we must do what we can to stop them. Very rapidly, you start seeing yourself spending millions and millions of pounds making the organisation safer. Relatively rapidly, however, you realise that you could spend an infinite amount of money on making the organisation safe and that society simply cannot afford it. You are forced to the painful decision that the value of preventing a fatality is actually finite. Indeed, there is an acceptance of this fact among safety professionals—the current figure is about £1.5 million per fatality prevented, which aligns quite closely with the National Institute for Clinical Excellence figure of £30,000 to £50,000 per quality life year. Of course, you do not come by this figure—it is called the willingness-to-pay figure—by asking people whether they would die for £1.5 million, because the answer would clearly be no. What you do is observe their behaviours and the incremental risks that they take in their everyday lives, be it from crossing the road, from driving a car after having a drink—not above the limit—from speeding, from our love affair with transport and from all the incremental risks that we take with our lives to gratify our needs. We are in the dilemma of proportionality or balance—a dilemma that this House faces over and over again when looking at legislation. When it comes to safety at work and safety to the public, we are constantly trying to make this balance. There are two current solutions. One is prescription, which works remarkably well. In aviation, you do not decide how to make your airline safe; you do it the way you are told. There are international standards for constructing and operating aeroplanes and for licensing engineers and pilots. Similarly, the Fire Precautions Act 1971 tells you what to do. It is fairly prescriptive: you just obey the Act and you are deemed to have done enough on behalf of society to protect people from death and injury. The Road Traffic Acts are a suite of rules which are there to prevent death and injury. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 is quite different. It introduces the concept of the duty holder and the concept of reducing risk to as low as reasonably practical. The duty holder must make the decision and only on that decision will the Health and Safety Executive or the Health and Safety Commission decide whether the actions are sufficient. Nevertheless, the Health and Safety Commission and the Health and Safety Executive, working with the 1974 Act, have had stunning and powerful success, as other noble Lords have said, in bringing about great improvement and safety in most of industry and to railway passengers. Indeed, I think that many of us involved were quite comfortable about how the Act was operating, at least until around the turn of the century. At that point, the HSE produced the document Reducing Risks, Protecting People, whose aim was to help us to understand how to use the Act. The problem was that that brought in so much precaution and so many new risks—particularly the new risk of societal concern, which I still have trouble seeing as anything more than what was read on the front page of the Daily Mail after an accident—that it introduced the whole phenomenon of risk aversion. Risk aversion is generally powered by poor decision-making among employers. Nevertheless, the uncertainty in the Act feeds that risk aversion and poor decision-making. In turn, that poor decision-making causes costs and delays, damages operational performance and inhibits innovation. Worst of all, it creates derision. Sadly, ““health and safety”” is a phrase of derision in far too many places in our society, which actually reduces safety and causes accidents. One way round that problem is to have excellent safety leadership, of which we have heard one or two examples today. A business with excellent safety leadership is a very special business—at every level, from chairman, chief executive, directors and everywhere in the management chain through to the trade union partnership, safety is part of all decision-making. If you can achieve that, you can continue to achieve the balance. Sadly, many firms are too small or they take the view, ““It won’t happen to us””, or they try to solve the problem by bad, risk-averse decisions. That leads to a sub-optimal position, with a lack of safety leadership and of clear regulation, which in turn leads to cost and/or risk. I reluctantly come to the view that we will have to bring certainty back into the equation. I believe that the certainty that we see in aviation or in fire regulations—modern, up-to-date, fit-for-purpose, sensible certainty—has to be part of the ongoing solution. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the HSE have done a brilliant job, but I am no longer convinced that they are fit for purpose. We should have a root-and-branch review of the Act. There certainly needs to be a widespread public debate, which needs take account of the partnership between the employer, workers and the public. At the end of the day, we need a set of laws and ways of enforcing them that are clear at all levels in our society. I believe that that certainty, with fit-for-purpose regulation, will bring better results in cost and safety for all members of our society.