Health and Safety at Work

My Lords, I apologise to my colleagues, particularly my former trade union colleagues, for having to slip out to see somebody at an inconvenient time during this debate. One theme that is moving rapidly up the agenda and which I would particularly like to address is that of older workers. The theme of older workers is increasingly being raised, partly because of the pensions crisis and partly because of the Green Paper on welfare which was welcomed this week. The national priority is to give a large percentage of older people the opportunity and, indeed, the encouragement to be in employment. The aspiration of getting an extra million people into employment comes against the background that, far from that being part of the trend for people in the 50 to 65 age bracket, the trend is going the other way. What is the reason for that? It has a lot to do with the occupational health theme of today’s debate. My impression—I stand to be corrected—is that occupational health services laid on by employers are not as common an activity as they were. There is a resource question there but, again, we have to reverse a big trend to get the resources to employ older workers. What issues are involved in employing all these people? First, we know that GPs will be trying to agree new guidelines on giving out sick notes. Common sense suggests that three things will then be needed. First, there will have to be genuine jobs in all the regions for these people to go to. That is stating the obvious but let me state the obvious on something else. Secondly, those jobs will have to be geared to a lot of people whose state of health is such that employers would not have thought of them as ideal people to employ. However, in the future employers will not be able to offload millions of such people on to the welfare system. Thirdly—again, I state the obvious but sometimes one has to check that all the obvious points are in the equation—these people must be prepared to take the jobs, having regard to all the usual issues of pay and antisocial hours and so on. I speak as someone who has some difficulty, for example, with the Government’s emphasis on the individual opt-out from the 48-hour working directive—a maximum brought in by the Working Time Directive under the health and safety clauses of the EU treaty. Incidentally, those are the same clauses that brought in the hugely popular right to four weeks’ holiday paid up-front, which has been an enormous boost to millions of people—indeed, to all of us. We have to recognise that there is a huge health and safety connection between people’s inclination to take employment and the issues facing employers. Shortly we will need to look urgently at the occupational health requirements in translating all the very good new policy developments into practice. That will perhaps follow the Green Paper on welfare and is not totally unconnected with the White Paper, which will come out in May, on the Adair Turner report on pensions. With a view to making some of those assertions, I thought that I had better do some homework and read about what the HSE programmes are doing at the moment. I echo what a number of noble Lords have said—the HSE programmes seem to be right up to the mark in addressing the issues that need to be addressed. Although I have questions about occupational health within employment, the HSE knows that work-related stress (13 million days lost) and what we might call backache-type disorders (12 million days lost) account for the large majority of the 2 million people who suffer from work-related ill health. The second generalisation arising from that is that in some respects, although it may seem paradoxical, health has always been harder to tackle than safety because often cause and effect are not so clearly linked. But where the link is established and exposure can be measured, such as when dealing with lead poisoning, then our traditional intervention techniques have worked well. The view of occupational health has now widened from exposure to hazardous materials and agents to cover common health problems. Those are not just work-related, but the HSC’s strategy acknowledges that there is a huge job to be done and it flags up the need for a more strategic and partnership-based approach and a greater role for providing accessible advice and support, especially to smaller businesses. Workplace Health Connect is a new service developed by HSE and will offer occupational health, safety and return-to-work advice to SMEs. The Workplace Health Connect branding and marketing will state that it is run by the HSE. Research shows that, while SMEs want authoritative advice, they are reluctant to approach the enforcing authorities for it directly. As an aside, talking about resources, we know that there has been a 35 per cent fall in the number of prosecutions of employers in the past three years and a 25 per cent drop in enforcement notices. Without getting into statistical questions, the idea that there is a growing regulatory burden is almost the reverse of what one might say is the broad picture to paint here, and I think that that is the policy echoed by the Government in the Green Paper. The advice will be given at three levels: at level 1 will be free advice with limited web support in England and Wales; at level 2, Pathfinders will provide free problem-solving workplace visits via employer requests in five areas covering about 40 per cent of England and Wales; and at level 3 there will be signposting to specialist support, for which businesses have to pay. The full roll-out in England and Wales is planned for 2008, and there are parallel initiatives for the rest of the United Kingdom. Therefore, the vision for the future, which I think we are all emphasising, is that we have to work through the consequences of a high level of employment for everyone of working age in terms of mental and psychological health and so on, all of which is very important. It is not a question of forcing people back to work; it is a question of finding the conditions where people’s psychological as well as physical health can best be met by employment. The issue of work being recognised as important and beneficial obviously raises many wider questions about job satisfaction. We cannot go into that here but it is typically on the agenda of trade unions when they discuss such matters with employers. We have to ensure that there is an honest agenda relating to the causes of stress and other factors at work, although we are not going to wake up soon and find that we are living in Utopia. People have their own responsibilities. If you drink two or three bottles of red wine at night, you do not wake up in the best state to go to work the following morning. Obviously lifestyle choices from an early age come into this. But if we are to do a job on behalf of people at work—and on behalf of the national economy in the broadest sense in increasing productivity—we have to recognise that reducing health inequalities and social exclusion is a vital part of that. Equally vital is that people who wish to, and are fit to do so, should be able to work to a later age.