My Lords, I declare an interest as the chairman of a company that from time to time gives health and safety advice and as a former Minister for health and safety. I start from the assumption that there is something a bit peculiar about an outside body controlling the way that an individual shall disport himself in his own business—particularly if it is held in his home. That is not unreasonable. More and more people work at home. We are changing the law to make it impossible for people who rent accommodation to be told that they cannot work at home. There are many jobs that people do at home where, frankly, telling someone that they should not stand on an upturned waste-paper basket to get something down from a shelf is an intrusion.
That is my basis, so I do not come to this with any antagonism. There is truth in the feeling that the health and safety regulations have, whether because of their application or because of the perception, stopped a whole lot of activities which it would be better not to have stopped. I also know that many of those who are opposed to the European Union have used this as an excuse to bash the European Union when, of course, almost all of it is our domestic attitudes, and the European Union has adopted British attitudes towards health and safety. I often point out to people that the ease with which the European Union is blamed for things is one of the problems with people’s perception of that very important institution to which we belong and to which I trust that we will fight to ensure that we go on belonging.
However, there are some real problems here that have not been approached. Perhaps I may give some practical experience. Recently, I talked to someone who had been held responsible for an accident in premises which he owned and oversaw by a self-employed person who did something dangerous to himself, but not on his own property but on that of the person concerned. We have to face the odd issue that if we are not very careful, we will have circumstances in which the employee of a firm will be protected and the self-employed will find themselves protected or affected only when they are working somewhere else. Does that mean that a self-employed person who has no responsibility under the Act to protect himself nevertheless has a case against someone else for his own actions, because they happened to be on their premises? That may not seem to be a general activity, but it is a bit more general than some would like. That would bring no benefit to people’s approach to health and safety legislation.
I use that example not because it is the most important, but because it makes me wonder whether, in the speedy time in which the Bill has been discussed, we have thought through all the ramifications. Having been a Minister for health and safety, I have to say that it is a very complex area. Apart from the very real sense that people feel that we have overdone it in many concerns, let us also accept that it has had remarkable success in protecting people, sometimes from themselves.
That brings me to my second point. My noble friend raised the argument of whether, if you have sufficient people exempted from cover, those who are not covered will know whether they are exempted. In other words, there seems to be a real complication about how people get to know whether they should be there or not. That in itself is one of the things that will bring the Act into disrepute. People will say, “I don’t know if I am covered. Perhaps I had better find out—I had better get somebody to tell me”. Frankly, they will find themselves in precisely the position from which the Government are, absolutely rightly, trying to protect them. I have a real issue with the complications which inevitably come if we are dealing with this.
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Thirdly, one of the advantages of the health and safety Act has been to bring to people’s attention the danger of doing certain things which they may not know about. Most self-employed people are not experts in health and safety, and they do things that they ought not to do not because they necessarily intend to be unconcerned with their own health and safety but simply because they do not know. The Health and Safety Executive has over the years provided extremely helpful information. If you are subject to the Act, it is a natural relationship between you and the authorities to get the information that you need. I wonder what the position will be if you are not subject to the Act and whether you would be able to access or have the information that you need.
The problem for me is that there are all sorts of things which, frankly, we should never have allowed to go on within the activities of the Health and Safety Executive. People really should be responsible for sensible behaviour and some of the cases are so awful that we should be quite ashamed of not dealing with them. There is the case, for example, of the boys who broke into a site owned by English Heritage. They clearly broke into it after it was closed, by going over the fences. They climbed on to the roof and then bet each other to jump off it. One of them had been personally injured beforehand—he was in fact disabled—and when he did so, he did himself huge harm. English Heritage was advised that it should not defend this case in the courts because it would be likely to lose. Taking that simple example, if you climb over somebody else’s fence when it is clear that you should not be there, then climb on to and jump off the roof, that is your fault. There should be no health and safety grounds whatever in such cases and when dealing with them, the court should say whatever might be a proper version of “B— off”.
There are so many cases which have meant that people are afraid to open their homes or, for example, to offer to open a farm to people to learn about sheep
in case one of the children touches the sheep and therefore gets some disease. All these things are serious assaults on the system and we have to be careful not to make our system look ridiculous, for very good reason. I really object when people suggest that everything is well in the health and safety world and that it is only about people’s perceptions. Frankly, it is not only that; the system makes fools of us all very many more times than ought to be so. However, that should not lead us to make further mistakes in our legislation. I am disposed to be happier if people working in their own homes should be given the responsibility of deciding how to work safely, although I object instinctively to the idea that because I am self-employed some busybody from outside should tell me how to write an article at home, whether I should hold my pen in one way or another or what I should do about the possibility of stress-related illnesses. I find that objectionable and I think that many Members of the House on both sides would agree. I just wonder whether this solution does not create more problems than it solves, and whether the Government should not provide rather more time for some exploration of the issues being properly raised in this debate.