Health and Safety at Work

My Lords, I join my colleagues in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, for this debate. Workers in Britain should probably be more grateful to him, because it is clearly a major issue. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Lea, will be able to persuade some unions to publish an analysis of this debate in union journals. It is as well that they know that some parliamentarians are interested and concerned about the problem. It is all too easy to generalise about health and safety and accidents at work, because different organisations vary so much. Several people have mentioned the construction industry. That was imprinted in my memory in the late 1980s, when I was asked to represent the TUC at a memorial service at a church in London for construction workers who had died in the previous 12 months. Sadly, I cannot remember the exact number, but I went along assuming that it was for the workers who had died in Britain. In fact, it was some 30 or 40 workers who had died in London. This brought home to me just how serious this industry can be. It is notoriously difficult to deal with because of the large turnover of workers, distant sites, time-limited contracts, loose materials and tools lying about, and often poor supervision—although it is fair to say that this is not exclusively an employer problem. For some reason construction workers, perhaps through familiarity, seem unwilling to do a great deal about following the rules. To all this is now added a language difficulty, because of the many European workers now in construction. This industry calls for special attention and some analysis of how we can best improve the situation. The general rules that might apply in your Lordships’ House certainly would not work there. The other industry that has been mentioned which is extremely difficult is farming. It is not just a question of one man and his dog; really it is one man and his machine, or one woman and an agitated heifer. How you convey on a regular basis the need to be careful and warnings about particular machinery and accidents with large animals, I am not sure. But it would be useful if Defra and the NFU could from time to time convey to those in the industry what the issues are, and what has been learnt from what has happened. What might be of more general application for consideration are good examples of work that is being done in the right direction. Perhaps I can assist my noble friend Lady Whitaker, because I want to say something about what has been done at British Nuclear Fuels. I declare my interest, of which most people are aware. I assure the House that BNF has not asked me to speak about this—I wanted to do so myself. This is an industry that works with nuclear materials, very heavy loads, gases, acids and chemicals. Work is done at heights and in radioactive conditions. One could hardly imagine a more difficult situation to deal with. BNF’s approach to health and safety has three strands: the conventional one—for example, trips, falls and occupational ill health; nuclear safety; and radioactive safety. It has intensive training on safety, and refresher training. If health and safety performance slips, immediate corrective action is triggered. In fact the chief executive, on appropriate occasions, will make personal inspections and examinations of what may have happened. There are safety stand-down days, if it is clear that in any area all is not as it should be, for whatever reason. Staff have refresher behavioural programmes. I do not want to give a lot of figures, but the results have been remarkable over the past few years. The number of hours lost through accident or health and safety considerations in 2000–01 was 0.6 per 200,000 hours worked. By the middle of last year this figure had been reduced to 0.23 hours per 200,000 worked, which shows considerable progress in a situation that was already good. At Hunterston, which is a decommissioning and storage site, four years have passed without a lost-time accident. At Dungeness A, no lost-time accidents for 3 million hours of work have been recorded. Berkeley has received awards from RoSPA. Sizewell has won an international safety award. What is there to learn from this? Two factors are involved, and other noble Lords touched on them. First, you need an employer which is dedicated, apart from to being a successful company, to health and safety. If it is dedicated to health and safety, it probably will be a successful company. Secondly, a measure of union ownership of the health and safety programme is necessary, as is the case at Sellafield and its sites. The chair of Sellafield’s joint health and safety committee is a trade unionist and not a manager. For those noble Lords who are slightly doubtful about trade unions—most of them are not here today—I paraphrase Tony Hancock: not of all of us are out-of-sight Leftie Luddites. We are concerned about how we deal with these serious problems. They call for genuine trust and a genuine partnership between the unions and the employer. They have a common interest. Ownership of the job, I repeat, is important to all workers. We often seem to forget that. A bad accident rate loses contracts and livelihoods, as has been the case with those who were responsible for some of the railway tracks. There is a damaging belief these days that only management can manage, and that money and pay are only things that matter. In all the surveys with which I was involved during my union career, pay was always second or third in importance. Rarely was it of first importance. The organisation and management of work was always among the top three issues. We should call on the Government to search for other good examples. The noble Lord, Lord Harrison, mentioned some. We should consider with the CBI and the TUC how best to attain the safety successes which have been seen in certain industries. I hope that the Minister will say that something along these lines can be carried out.