Health and Safety at Work

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Harrison on this debate. It is a very interesting subject that needs some careful airing, and certainly the speeches of noble Lords today have given it just that. I come to this subject originally from a construction industry background. I have worked on many construction sites around the world and recall working in Romania at the time of that lovely man, Mr Ceausescu, where the average construction worker had a litre of home-made wine and a loaf of bread for lunch. It did not help the accident rate after lunch. But that is not confined to Romania, and it is not confined to the construction industry. I commiserate with the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, on the lack of visible support behind him. Whether that has anything to do with it being the workers who tend to get injured and the owners who get some of the blame, I do not know, but I am sure that the noble Lord has lots of support in spirit. I believe that the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act has been a general success, as other noble Lords have said. I shall concentrate on transport, and reflect on the differences of application between different modes. The HSE is involved in air travel until you get to the finger pier, which is fine because the CAA then takes it over. The HSE is involved in maritime until you get over the water, more or less. It is totally involved in, or in charge of, rail. Although its responsibility is moving to the Office of Rail Regulation, it is still the same legislation. Then, as my noble friend Lady Gibson said, there is road transport. There is a certain lack of consistency in policy and application. I have been reflecting on the accident rates for deaths and serious injuries. My noble friend Lord Harrison said that there were about 2,000 deaths in industries that you might call under the responsibility of the HSE. Road deaths overall are 3,500. As my noble friend Lady Gibson said, the HSE believes that between 800 and 1,000 of those occurred at work, but I would argue that essentially everybody is at work when on the road. I therefore believe that 3,500 is a good figure—if you can call it good in that respect. On the railways, the figure is 10 to 20 a year. But the HSE has no responsibility for road transport. My noble friend said that RoSPA and others are doing great work on communication and information to try to get people to perform better on the roads, on which I commend them. My noble friend particularly mentioned those at work, including company car drivers, who have some of the worst records for road accidents. The missing element is enforcement, is it not? The HSE has told me that the regulations should be enforced by the police, but we all know that they are not. The police do very little enforcement. We heard about bicycles during Questions today—and it is a pity that none of the bicycle supporters had time to get in, but we hope to put that right on another occasion. We do not have traffic police. I sometimes think that, because of all their other activities, the police view road accidents and enforcement as a sort of spare-time occupation. That is not good enough. When more people are being killed on the roads than in any other work-related activity, something is seriously wrong. The noble Lord, Lord Harrison, gave the example of someone who was fined £20,000 over a death at work, if one can call it that. The value for preventable fatalities which the Government suggested should be used for road and rail deaths—that is, the value above which you do not invest to put right something that may have caused the accident, but below which you do—is £1.5 million. I know that the two figures are not directly related but there seems to be an awfully wide band between a £20,000 fine and the £1.5 million needed to put it right. It is another example of the lack of consistency in policies across the modes. I hope that that can be looked at in the future. The HSE has been involved in the railways for a long time, and one must give it credit for introducing new procedures, getting accident rates down and generally improving the structure of safety and enforcement. My view is that it has now gone over the top and that, as other noble Lords have said, it needs a review. But it does not need to be removed; it just needs to be reviewed, with a little more objectivity coming in. I have had discussions with some of those who work on the Rail Safety and Standards Board, of which my noble friend Lord Tunnicliffe is chair, about the values of preventable fatality and the whole business of level crossings which came up at various times during the Road Safety Bill debates. It is questionable whether a value for preventable fatality should apply to people who try to kill themselves whether it is actually suicide or people who weave in and out of level crossings and, unfortunately, kill themselves. Sometimes they cause other people to be killed as well. I am not convinced that, if you contribute to your own demise, society should contribute quite such a high amount of money to stop you doing it again—not that it would be you, sadly. The other problem that my noble friend Lord Tunnicliffe mentioned was about consistency and certainty. Safety on the railways is moving forward quite fast, but, rightly or wrongly, there is still a residue of the fear of prosecution. I am told that Network Rail’s assessment of values for preventable fatality has resulted in a figure that is three times higher than the Government’s specified maximum. That adds cost to the railways for no particular benefit. It may avoid prosecution but I think that we are well past that now. I hope that we can turn over a new leaf in the whole industry and move forward. As my noble friend said, certainty is very important. We need to encourage creativity in industry without affecting safety. There are things that can be done. We can look at methodologies for working on the railway on the Continent and in the United States and Canada, where they have some very good ideas. In Canada, a new set of points for signalling can be installed four hours; it probably takes two days here. Much of it is safety-related because of the bureaucracy. I hope that we can now move forward. I congratulate the Government on putting the railways on a stable footing so that they can start to be creative and implement new ideas at significantly less cost. My noble friend Lord Harrison mentioned inspections. The railways get inspected ad nauseam. That is probably all right, but it costs money. Having an inspection once every 20 years is just as ridiculous. Having inspectors turn up unannounced is the best way of ensuring that management gets it right to start with. There is a great deal to be done. My last word is on Crown immunity. If we are to have corporate manslaughter in some shape or form, then—given the rather uncertain status of different organisations in transport regarding whether they are part of the Crown—an exception for the Crown would destroy the whole basis of the legislation. If legislation is to apply then it should apply to everybody.