A couple of weeks ago David Cameron spoke about the 'burden of health and safety legislation' and Francis Maude took the opportunity to parrot his leader in his weekly column in the West Sussex County Times.I would like to counter some of the rubbish written and said about health and safety and explain why it is not a burden after all.
Is it really such a burden to go about your job knowing that you have some protection against being put at unnecessary risk of injury or death? It may not feel like a priority to somebody like Francis Maude whose most serious workplace risk is a paper cut but anybody in construction, agriculture, manufacturing, and many other sectors has a lot to be grateful for.
Work-related deaths have fallen from 651 in 1974 to 229 in 2007/8. In the ten years up to 2007/8 alone, major injuries fell by about 9% and other injuries causing an absence from work of 3 days or more fell by about a quarter.
Even allowing for margins of error in reporting incidents, that equates to a lot of lives saved and hours of productivity gained, which all looks to me like more of a blessing than a burden. The reductions in deaths and accidents are something we should be proud of.
Of course there are cases where, through ignorance, the legislation is incorrectly or inappropriately applied. If you dig behind the headlines you will nearly always find that the cause is not restrictive legislation but somebody who does not understand the legislation and who is therefore applying it wrongly, or somebody with their own private agenda who is hiding behind an excuse of 'health and safety'.
For examples of such cases I thoroughly recommend the HSE's own website where they have a page that explains the truth behind some of these stories. (HSE Myth of the Month)
In parallel there is a campaign of willful mis-reporting of such cases in certain tabloid newspapers who have decided that "Elf 'n' Safety" is a convenient way to fill up their pages.
A recent example was when the TUC's campaign to stop employers forcing women to wear high heels if they didn't want to was represented as an attempt to ban high heels completely. We only remember the initial hysterical headlines and not the HSE's refutations of the myths.
This may be just lazy writing and thinking, or it may be part of an agenda to discredit the concept of health and safety in preparation for eroding the protections that employees and unions have secured over the years. Either way it is an insult to the workers who are in dangerous occupations to describe their protection as a burden - and dog whistle politics at its worst.
Having construction workers wear their own trainers instead of expensive steel-capped boots, and repair gangs working alongside railway lines without a lookout or protection master would be cheaper for the employers, but the real price would be paid by those making up the increase in work-related injuries and deaths.
When I worked for a railway company I had to spend at least three days a year on safety training to keep myself certified, and had some expensive steel toe-capped boots, and that was just for an office job where I had to sometimes find my own way round the potentially hazardous environment of a depot. Those who had to actually work trackside or go into lift chambers had to have a lot more training and equipment, and similar situations apply in other industries.
Employers could save a lot of money by reducing the precautions they take, and all the risk would fall on the frontline staff - not the accountants and managers. Some employers will protect their staff at all costs but others will grab any chance to improve profits even if it means a greater risk of injury or death to expendable workers.
Those companies will be rubbing their hands with glee every time a newspaper prints a story that contributes to a climate where relaxing health and safety legislation is seen as politically acceptable, aided and abetted by politicians aspiring to government.
I am proud to be in a party where measures to protect the lives and safety of workers are given a high priority, and will continue to support those measures in the face of an orchestrated campaign to remove them.
Many of my colleagues in the party have their own stories of the protection they have in their own workplaces and I will be encouraging them to share those stories here.
Andrew Skudder
Labour Party prospective parliamentary candidate for Horsham