Legislative Reform (Health and Safety Executive) Order 2008

I am grateful for the support that the order has received from the three noble Lords who have spoken. The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, talked about the progress that we have made since 1974 on health and safety, and about the important role that the commission and the Health and Safety Executive have played in that. That is absolutely right. There are still challenges out there that change as the nature of the workforce changes, which is why the improved governance arrangements provided for in the order are so important. The noble Lord also referred to enforcement and the importance of ensuring that enforcement action was independent and could not be fetter either by Ministers, by the commission or by the new board of the executive, as it will be. That is an absolutely clear principle, which has been maintained throughout this process. He referred to the number of proposed members on the board. At the moment, the order is essentially permissive; it allows for there to be between seven and 11 members—there are currently nine members plus the chair—and there are no plans at the moment to increase its size. The debate on what the appropriate size should be focused in particular on the need to ensure that there is scope for the range of skills that are needed on the board to bring full weight to bear on the issues that need to be addressed. He also talked about the protection of individuals and, in his terms, some of the nonsense that goes on. We always need to be careful in these situations not to perpetuate myths. Undoubtedly, in some instances, there are those with responsibility for enforcing health and safety who go over the top; and there are instances in which people use health and safety as a reason for not doing something that they would otherwise want to do. When investigated, however, many of the myths of conkers and of benches being three inches too high or too low are simply not true. The key to all this is to recognise that the people who create the risks have responsibility for managing them. This is not about eliminating risk but about managing it. The noble Lord referred to the compensation culture driving some of these issues. We need to think very carefully about this and to recognise that some people have been damaged at work by diseases with a long latency period and have struggled to get compensation 20, 30 or 40 years after the incident that has damaged their health, sometimes fatally.