My Lords, I address the House as a former Minister for Health and Safety. I agree with almost all of the speech by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie. Health and safety in this country has received a pretty bad press for quite the wrong reasons, but health and safety in the workplace is something that we should be immensely proud of. I think it is still true that the United States has about four times the number of accidents in the construction industry, for example, than we do here. We have a proud record in what we do but it is not a record to be complacent about; the noble Lord rightly said that this is something that you have to keep on about all the time.
So I do not rise with any antagonism either to the health and safety laws or to the very important role that trade unions play in ensuring that, in workplaces up and down the country, these laws are adhered to and employers take their responsibilities seriously, and indeed that work people take their responsibilities seriously. Very often, when employing in these circumstances, I found that it was the trade union representative who did most to ensure that, for example, people used hearing protection, which is always such a difficult thing to get many people to wear. Indeed in one factory, when I was Minister for Health and Safety, I found that the staff failed to put the earplugs in their ears but put them in their noses because they did not like the smell of the oil, which was not the purpose of the whole process.
The trade unions play a hugely important part in this. However, I do not understand why in those circumstances we should be ashamed of saying how much time it takes. We should be wanting to say how much time it takes, generously speaking of it and being able to point to businesses and parts of the public sector that do not seem to do as well as others. I am not afraid of transparency in this area. I know that there is a feeling on the Benches opposite that that it is all designed to stop things, but I am not sure that that is true.
I share very much the Minister’s point about anything that starts with a comment from the TaxPayers’ Alliance, which means that it is probably fallacious; its use of words, and certainly of figures, is almost universally to be questioned, at the very least—rather less so than the IEA, but I would certainly be careful about relying much on its figures. I seem to remember some figures produced by the TaxPayers’ Alliance showing the suggested cost of the necessary green measures on energy efficiency being entirely wrong, and I want to take that opportunity to say so.