8:20am Thursday 15th July 2010
By Chris Koenig
In a county like Oxfordshire, at the forefront of innovation and new technology, monitoring risks to health and safety is all important — particularly in times of recession, when some organisations might be tempted to cut a few financial corners here and there.
But the message which Judith Hackitt, chairman of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), will hammer home at an event tomorrow at BMW’s Oxford car factory is that paying proper attention to such issues actually helps the bottom line too.
Ms Hackitt, 55, who lives in East Hanney, said: “It makes good financial sense because the cost of accidents is enormous.
“We don’t want to stand in the way of progress, but anyone would agree that stopping people being killed or injured is right morally as well as legally.”
Ms Hackitt, who has lived in Oxfordshire for 20 years with her husband David and two daughters, speaks from the heart here. She said: “My father and grandfather were coalminers and my great aunt was scalped in a horrible accident in a hat factory.”
At BMW tomorrow, businesses and other organisations in Oxfordshire will be invited to take the HSE Pledge and sign up to maintaining standards of risk management even in hard times. More than 1,600 companies nationally have signed up since the pledge was introduced a year ago.
In Oxfordshire, organisations that already support the scheme include the five district councils, Oxfam, Oxford University, and BMW.
But is the HSE — so often ridiculed that its website includes a section called Myth of the Month — achieving its objectives?
Answer: a cautious yes. Statistics show that deaths have indeed decreased dramatically since 1974, when the Health and Safety at Work Act became law. That year, 651 people died from work-related causes; last year that figure was down to 180.
However, Ms Hackitt does not claim all the credit there for the HSE and is anything but complacent. She said: “It’s not all down to us. A proportion is due to the way industry has changed over the years.”
She added: “The area that does concern us now is occupational health — for example, the management of substances that can cause health problems in years to come.”
Asbestos is the obvious example here. Ms Hackitt says that there are young tradesmen about now who think that the problem has been solved, when that is far from the case.
And, of course, there are new hazardous materials appearing continually in workplaces which, if not properly handled, could cause thousands of deaths in years to come.
She said: “You need to look at the number of people who die every year because of harm that has been done to them in the workplace over several years, and that is harder to measure.”
Now Ms Hackitt is keeping an eye on a review of Health and Safety led by Lord Young of Graffham and set up by Prime Minister David Cameron, the MP for Witney. She hopes that they recognise that HSE is often blamed and ridiculed for things that are in no way its fault, and that it would be all too easy to compromise in order to save costs for both public and private organisations.
Before the election, Mr Cameron was quoted as saying: “I think we’d all concede that something has gone seriously wrong with the spirit of health and safety in the past decade when children are made to wear goggles to play conkers.”
But Ms Hackitt points out that the job of the HSE is clear: to prevent death, injury or illness in the workplace and to promote a common-sense approach to that objective — and employees as well as employers were given responsibility in the 1974 Act.
She remarked: “Nothing to do with conkers.”
As the head of a publicly funded organisation employing 3,500 people, with responsibility for the whole UK, including offshore oil and gas installations, Ms Hackitt takes an equally brusque view of people who say they “can’t be bothered with it” and those who produce far too many irritating signs like: “Beware hot water” on taps that everyone knows are designed to produce hot water.
Both groups open up her organisation to ridicule — unfairly, she says.
And ridicule there is aplenty. Myths of the Month on the HSE website include: Health and Safety Brings Candyfloss To A Sticky End (this month); Health and Safety Risks Stop Children Playing ‘Pin the Tail on the Donkey’ (June); and ‘You don’t need to secure your load if you are just going down the road’ (May).
Ms Hackitt said: “We seem to get the blame when other people don’t use their common sense and don’t act proportionately because they are frightened of being sued in the civil courts.”
She says that all too often when an industry claims it cannot do something because enforcing health and safety regulations would be too difficult, that something can indeed be done in a safe way.
It’s a “Yes you can” attitude from someone who has seen the consequences of bad industrial practices first hand.
But is there not a built-in temptation here for unscrupulous people to simply take their unsafe practices, perhaps in manufacturing, to a developing country where health and safety is not taken so seriously?
“Perhaps, but this is why we want large companies to take a proportionate attitude everywhere in the world. It’s common sense.”
She trained as a chemist at Imperial College, London, as did her husband, and then as a teacher. She became chair of the Health and Safety Commission, as it then was, in 2007. And she insists that she has no wish to enforce silly or “disproportionate” laws on anyone.
Certainly over the years attitudes to hazards at work have changed.
Here in Oxford, for instance, the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland was based on someone with a nervous tick from working with hazardous materials at work. He became a figure of fun in a way which would be unthinkable these days.
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