Health and Safety at Work

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Harrison for initiating this very important debate. I declare an interest as the president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, which has briefed me today. As a former health and safety commissioner, I know well the importance of this debate. Long-term plans for health and safety are vital if any strategies are to be successful. That applies especially in the workplace where older dangers are being eradicated, but new dangers are arising. Over recent decades, the workplace and the world of work around it have changed significantly. The pace of change seems to be increasing. Nearly half of our work force is employed in large organisations. Part-time work has increased dramatically and women now constitute 50 per cent of the workforce. Manufacturing continues to fall and numbers in the service sector continue to rise. All these changes have an impact on health and safety at work, bringing new challenges for the regulators, employers and employees. The Health and Safety Commission believes that there is clear evidence that engaging the workforce benefits health and safety. That is a positive priority for it. The HSC continues to promote the business case for sensible health and safety and stresses that both the workforce and senior management have a responsibility for ensuring that health and safety becomes a main strategy at work. Health and safety representatives in companies play a key part in the achievement. The HSE works closely with RoSPA, which was established as a charity more than 80 years ago with a clear purpose to enhance the quality of life by exercising a powerful influence for accident prevention. It is concerned with safety in the home, at work, in water and leisure activities, in safety education and on the roads. I want to concentrate on the latter point today. Over the past eight years RoSPA has been developing a key issues approach to its work, focusing policy development on major topics, aiming to help to secure significant and lasting safety changes. I want to raise the need for the integration of the management of occupational road risk into mainstream occupational health and safety. Working with more than 100 other organisations, RoSPA is a major player in the Occupational Road Safety Alliance, campaigning to ensure that occupational road risk is addressed both by employers and regulators. Between 800 and 1,000 people are killed annually in accidents involving vehicles being driven for work purposes. Risk levels are high, as are the costs to employers, victims and society generally. RoSPA has developed guidance for organisations showing how accident rates and risks can be reduced substantially if employers tackle the issue using the framework they have in place for managing health and safety at work. As a member of the Government’s Work-related Road Safety Task Group, RoSPA helped to promote a national debate on the issue, leading to the publication of the HSE and Department for Transport guidance, Driving at Work. This guidance covers: communicating clear messages to staff about their approach to road safety; carrying out what is described as ““suitable and sufficient”” risk assessments; ensuring that employers are doing as much as is ““reasonably practicable”” to avoid risk on the road and to ensure safe driving; providing driver training, where necessary; and monitoring and reviewing performance. Safe journey planning, properly maintained vehicles and avoidance of driving while tired are all covered by the guidance in the booklet, as are potential health impairments including alcohol and drugs. RoSPA has strongly welcomed the booklet. However, it has also placed on record its great concern that the guidance does not contain any reference to work-related road safety. This is where RoSPA and the HSE part company. The HSE believes that road safety at work should be regulated by the police and that more evidence is needed to justify HSE being more involved. RoSPA believes this to be misguided. RoSPA recognises that the HSE needs to work in partnership with other key agencies, obviously, but also that this is not incompatible with accepting that managing occupational road risk is mainstream health and safety. After all, work-related road accidents are the biggest cause of work-related accidental death, with up to 20 people, on average, likely to die in work-related road crashes every week. Millions of workers have to drive as part of their job. In doing so, they cover much greater mileage than they would do if driving in a purely private capacity. Employers can, of course, both exacerbate and ameliorate levels of risk faced by their employees while at work on the road. For example, they can increase the dangers by requiring employees to drive too far, too fast, in adverse weather conditions, in unsafe or inappropriate vehicles and to use mobile phones while driving. Conversely, having clear policies on speed, safe journey planning and ““no mobiles while mobile”” can reduce the risks. In an increasingly service-based economy, work-related road safety is clearly part of the changing world of work. There are definite links between driving and musculoskeletal disorders and stress, the two biggest causes of absence related to ill health caused, or made worse, by work. Both causes are clearly HSE priorities. Work-related road safety is an excellent health and safety culture builder and can help develop positive attitudes to sensible safety, which the HSE advocates. There is clear and growing political—and wider—public support for the idea of making work-related road safety part of health and safety at work. It has been a feature of the recent report into the work of the HSC, conducted by the House of Commons Select Committee on Work and Pensions. While road traffic law obviously places duties on all road users, where people are on the road while at work, health and safety law also applies. In this context, key duties placed on employers by the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations have particular relevance, especially risk assessment, risk avoidance, training and monitoring. The police, by and large, address the behaviour of individual road users; it is not part of their normal remit or training to adopt a proactive approach with employers. The HSE is needed to respond to complaints by employees about work-related road issues and to review risk management arrangements for workplaces. Promoting a risk management approach by employers to work-related road safety would also help to support HSE’s priority theme work on site transport safety. This could be included in the inspectors’ visits, so helping employers take an overview of their road transport operations as a whole. These are just some of the reasons behind RoSPA’s position. Obviously, this agenda would pose clear challenges for the HSE and RoSPA has sympathy with its view that additional resources may be needed to tackle this area of work. However, with the passage of time, surely it must be recognised that work-related road safety should be made a priority for the future work on health and safety. I believe that immediate steps should be taken to work towards a new set of work-related road safety management standards and a relevant body be established to review progress to date, exchange information and advise on what can be done to promote and monitor further action in this area. Such a round-table approach would focus attention and encourage the considerable enthusiasm for the work-related road safety agenda, which continues to develop in the road and occupational safety communities. I look forward to my noble friend’s response to the points I have raised.