It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate. I had the pleasure of working at the TUC for five years, during which the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 was brought in. There is no doubt that thousands of lives have been saved and thousands of injuries prevented as a result of that Act.
I remember that, as a student in the 1960s, I worked in the vacations. I think I am probably the oldest person here. [Interruption.] Well, yes, my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) is extremely old. In those days, we typically worked in factories during the holidays. I remember the horrendous lack of health and safety—unguarded machines, poisonous chemicals, no hard hats—but that was the life people led. I used to put the guards on the machines that I worked on. They were lying on the ground, but their use was not enforced.
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This proposal is undoubtedly a weakening of the 1974 Act and it will inevitably lead to more people dying and being injured. I will look at the statistics in coming years if clause 1 goes through. I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) and my other hon. Friends who have spoken have persuaded the Government to drop the clause and that common sense will return, but there is no sign of that.
I well remember the 1974 Act going through and I was proud to be a member of the TUC staff. Going back even further, in my early days at the TUC, I was responsible for setting up the TUC construction industry committee. When I prepared the papers for that committee, the two big issues were bogus self-employment and health and safety. More than 40 years later, there is even more bogus self-employment. At that time, it was essentially restricted to the construction sector and was called “the lump”. People may remember the lump. There was an impressive TUC drama about it. Before the 1974 Act,
people worked in unregulated self-employment and accidents occurred. In the drama, there was an deep trench and a man was buried alive because the shuttering was not there and was not enforced. We hoped that that sort of thing had been stopped.
Some time later, I worked for another trade union, the National and Local Government Officers Association, which is now Unison. I used to attend the TUC construction committee as a trade union representative. I remember supporting Frank Chapple on enforcing the wearing of hard hats on building sites. We had different views on many things, but on that, we were as one. People would not wear hard hats unless they were told, “If you don’t wear a hard hat, you don’t work here.” That has to be enforced.
That brings me to my main point, which is that, rather than being weakened, the 1974 Act should be strengthened. We need proper enforcement. We have been sent briefings by a number of trade unions and the TUC. The Broadcasting Entertainment Cinematograph and Theatre Union says that in the entertainment and media sector, there is a very high proportion of self-employed people and a very low level of accident reporting. We need more enforcement and more reporting, so the Act needs strengthening, not weakening.