Safety at work: The real challenges

Date: 17/04/04

Britain's most-mocked quango makes some errors. But it's facing the right way

HAS the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) lost its marbles? It prosecuted London's police chief last year because two officers fell through roofs, one to his death, while investigating break-ins. It failed, and was vigorously rebuked by the trial judge. Yet according to the quality broadsheets of the Telegraph stables, it's at it again, this time telling mountaineers they must use two ropes, not one, when climbing a rockface. Maybe even scaffolding will be necessary. Can you believe it?

Don't: this latest alleged folly, like many earlier ones - crash helmets for tight-rope walkers, hand-rails for army assault courses, or closing London's Tower Bridge because of a demonstrator prancing on a nearby crane - is a media fantasy. Britain's safety-at-work body may go over the top at times, but not as often or as far as its critics claim. The safety regime's real problem is different: set up for an industrial society, it works in one dominated by services.

For all the tales of woe that any small businessman will tell you, the big issue, says the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), a business lobby group for small and medium-sized firms, is not so much the rules but the changes in them: the BCC's members can't afford the time, or in-house experts, to track every change. And the aggravation stems not from zeal (prosecutions are in fact growing fewer), but inconsistency: the requirements seem to vary from one inspector to the next.

The Engineering Employers' Federation says much the same. It dislikes changing or over-complex rules, especially some new, or coming, European Union (EU) ones on noise, vibration and electromagnetic and optical radiation. But sensible rules on health and safety, in which bosses and employees do share an interest, it says, are “a damned good thing”; it accepts that the HSE inspectors have a real job, and mostly do it reasonably; and after some early coolness, it gets on well enough with Bill Callaghan, the former Trades Union Congress economist who now chairs the tripartite commission that oversees the HSE.

Neither employers nor unions dispute that the regime, by and large, works. In the industries most concerned, employment has fallen some 40% since the HSE was born in the mid-1970s, but deaths by 70%, to about 225 a year today. And Britain's figures are far better than the EU average. Nearly all the HSE's work these days is to advise and prevent, not to punish: its 85,000 inspections each year lead to about 13,000 “enforcement notices” and only 1,000 or so prosecutions. Safety awareness, aided recently by rocketing insurance premiums, has spread: “You see far more hard hats these days,” says one employer.

The shift from manufacturing has helped cut injuries and deaths: only 7m of the 40m working days lost each year are due to accidents, compared with 33m to “stress” and similar ailments. But that calls for new diagnostic skills, and brings new suspicions: the roofer who falls 50 feet is a corpse, but the poorly seated keyboard worker with repetitive strain injury may look to his boss like a malingerer.

A second problem is that the safety regime is not one system but two. The HSE oversees farms and building sites (the two most lethal workplaces by far), mines, factories, railways, chemical works and the like. But warehouses and shops, offices, kitchens and other rising areas of the economy are the job of local councils.

That means over 400 authorities, most of which have little interest in workplace health or safety. The HSE has 1,100 on-site inspectors for 740,000 workplaces; councils have the equivalent of 1,200 full-timers (many in fact part-time, their main job being trading or food standards) for 1.2m workplaces. The HSE may inspect an engineering workshop one year in eight; the council gets round to a graphics studio one year in 12. A workstation isn't a lathe, but is it “over-enforcement” to leave the workers' seating, lighting and desk heights uninspected for so long? No, says the TUC's safety chief, Hugh Robertson.

The council averages, in fact, conceal huge variation. The keenest tenth of councils inspect from a third to two-thirds of the premises in their area annually; the least zealous tenth fewer than one in 20.

Does that matter? Service-sector deaths are indeed few, only about 75 a year and the risks of injury look slim too. But many injuries that are in law “reportable” are never reported: the real total, on survey evidence, may be 2 times the official figure. Even so, councils issue over 5,000 enforcement notices a year, and bring some 300 prosecutions.

Health is trickier than safety. Asbestosis or “vibration white finger” are diagnosable disorders. But what about back pain? Any hospital nurse knows it as a genuine, work-related condition, often due to shifting heavy patients; any GP has met it as a skivers' charter. And stress? A high achiever's pleasant buzz is someone else's unbearable pressure. Some 500,000 people tell surveys their work has hurt their back, their nerves or suchlike in the preceding 12 months. New surveys this year and next will shed more light on them - but little, probably, on how far regulators should go to prevent them.

In sum, the health and safety regime, shaped for a world of industry and injury, faces a new one, that of services and (real or not) stress. Much must change, says Mr Callaghan, whose commission is meant to oversee both halves of the system. Local councils, broadly, agree. He and they are now trying to redefine who does what and how, jointly, to get the best results from slim resources. For once, employers and unions agree on the objective. The details will be another matter.

Article says that the UK's most-mocked quango, the Health and Safety Executive, makes some errors, but it is facing the right way.

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