I shall speak to Amendments 87A, 89A and 89B, which are in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Donaghy, and in support of Amendments 79 and 80A to which we have added our names. Our focus in this contribution is health and safety and particularly the role of safety reps. I should make it clear that focusing just on that does not mean that we resile from the broader issues of representation and facility time which have been argued so effectively by my noble friends.
I came at this issue and learned about health and safety not through long active work in the trade union movement, like a lot of my noble friends, but as Minister for Health and Safety in the DWP under the
tutelage, for a period, of my noble friend Lord Hain, who is not in his place. I understood from that the importance of partnership working, the role of the HSE and, in particular, the role of safety reps and the contribution they can make.
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Anything this Bill does that potentially undermines that role and undermines health and safety should be opposed as rigorously as we can. If we need reminders about the impact of health and safety, let us look at the statistics for the economy as a whole, not just the public sector. Despite the fact that we are recognised around the world as having a very good and effective health and safety system, in 2014-15 142 workers were still killed at work, 1.2 million working people suffered a work-related illness, 611,000 injuries occurred at work according to the Labour Force Survey and 27.3 million working days were lost due to work-related illness and workplace injury at an estimated cost, according to the HSE, of something like £14.3 billion. There are still around 13,000 work-related deaths, predominantly from cancer caused by past failures to address health and safety issues. I return to the point that anything that undermines good health and safety potentially has very substantial costs for our economy, individuals and employers.
So far as Amendment 87A is concerned, I will address in a moment the reason why we consider that health and safety reps should be removed from the scope of Clauses 12 and 13 but, should that view not prevail, we consider that the publication requirements concerning time spent by safety reps and their costs would not show a meaningful picture without recognition of the benefits which they bring to an organisation, a point that has just been made by my noble friend Lady Donaghy. These benefits accrue to the employer, employees and more widely. As a former health and safety Minister, I recall a case where there were problems with a construction site where a crane collapsed and killed somebody walking in the street nearby, so it is not just employers and employees who are affected by this. It is simply a nonsense to look at costs of safety reps without looking at the other side of the question. Of course that begs the question of how you construct this requirement, and that would have to be dealt with in regulations, but it is perfectly possible to flesh out rules that would require some balance if this publication is to take place. What lessons do you learn in terms of the time that safety reps spend for an employer? You cannot just look at the time or the cost without understanding the risk profile of the business environments in which they are working.
Amendment 89A would remove from Clause 13 the prospect of a Minister making regulations which restrict the right of safety reps to time to carry out their duties. Amendment 89B would prevent the time costs of safety reps being included in the calculations which can be used to restrict facility time. On this point, I am grateful to Hugh Robertson of the TUC for focusing on this matter and reminding us that time off for health and safety reps to perform their functions is not strictly facility time but a separate legal requirement of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and of the European framework directive. Indeed, it would be
a breach of European legislation—long may this be relevant—to restrict or cap the time that safety reps take. It has been suggested that the Government accept this view. I think the Minister may have expressed that; perhaps she will take this opportunity to confirm that. So if there is no intent to restrict the time of safety reps, why not remove them from the scope of Clause 13? If that is the case, the Bill allows a back door to impose a de facto restriction on the time of safety reps which would be in breach of legislation if imposed directly. The mischief is that the Government are saying that health and safety reps can have as much time off as they need, but the total amount of time that a union can have off will be capped, so the Government are trying to force unions to restrict the time themselves by saying that time spent by health and safety reps will come off the time available to other representatives. This must be opposed.
The Robens report on health and safety, which led to the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, was clear that an effective health and safety system requires the involvement of all the workforce, and that health and safety systems work best when trade unions and employers work together. This has proved to be the case, which is why the Act gave legal backing to union safety reps. This is all in the context that it is of course the duty of the employer to ensure, so far as reasonably practical, the safety and welfare of all his employees. It is not for Ministers to intervene or to take over that responsibility, or to second-guess employers. Employers have the legal responsibility, and that is as it should be: those who create the risks should have the responsibility for managing them.
We know what health and safety reps do. It is massively effective, saving countless numbers of people from injury and ill health, let alone costs to the benefit system and the NHS, and indeed preventing the human tragedy that comes with accidents or fatalities in the workplace. There have been numerous studies over the years underlining the benefits that union safety reps bring to employers and society. Indeed, over a decade ago the then DTI estimated their value to society to range up to £578 million per year. Although for manufacturing an earlier study found that employers with health and safety committees at half the injury rates of employers who manage without, the Health and Safety Commission—before its merger with the HSE—produced a declaration stating:
“Trade union safety representatives, through their empowered role for purposes of consultation, often lead to higher levels of compliance and better health and safety performance than in non trade union systems”.
The current HSE website cites a large body of evidence that points to the advantages of involving workers in health and safety risk management. Trade unions covering the public and private sectors can offer countless examples of the benefits of health and safety reps making workplaces safer, as well as identifying the training that they undertake and encourage in others—in many instances, as we have heard, spending their own time on it. We should be supportive of these systems and not, because of some antipathy to health and safety or to trade unions, seek to chip away at what has been achieved. Given the acknowledged benefits that
safety reps can bring to the workplace, it is perhaps surprising that more is not being directed to ensure compliance with the legal requirement for employers to consult with employees on matters of health and safety.
We should genuinely be proud of our health and safety system but never complacent, as the costs of failure can be high. We should be encouraging safety reps to play a full part in securing the safety of our workplaces, rather than seeking to embroil them in a bureaucratic process that devalues their efforts. Have 20,000 schools, many of them riddled with asbestos, not got better things to do than form-fill for the Secretary of State?