My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, for the way that she introduced her amendment in this group, to which I have added my name. The beginning of the letter circulated earlier says:
“The Government remains committed to protecting consumers from unsafe products. From toys to cosmetics, these products are essential to our daily lives and ensuring they are safe underpins both consumer confidence and competitive markets”.
Yet we are faced with a large amount of health and safety legislation simply falling, with no real understanding of why. That is why I added my name to the amendment. A lot of aspects of health and safety are complained about by some of the people who have to implement the regulations—they say they are excessive—yet, as has already been said, they save thousands of lives every year. It comes down to the fundamental question of how much value we put on the lives of our citizens.
We started off today discussing child seat belts. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, and the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, certainly dealt with that topic comprehensively, but I want to touch on seat belts in general. Before the 1980s legislation, when only 40% of people wore seat belts, there were about 500 deaths a year and about 10 times as many hospital admissions to treat serious injuries—so, about 5,000. In 2021, a quarter of the people who died on the roads were not wearing seat belts, despite our existing legislation. It seems that there are approximately 75 deaths every year in the UK from people not wearing seat belts. That is a dramatic decrease, and it is also a dramatic decrease in cost to the nation of managing serious injury.
10 pm
Many people who run building sites might not like some of the regulations they have to adhere to, yet falling from height is still the biggest killer in our workplace. Currently, the Work at Height Regulations save about 30 people a year. If they were removed, that would have a disproportionate impact on some of the poorest families in our communities, who tend to have jobs where height is involved. I feel that some of those regulations may fall into being viewed as impeding efficiency, productivity and profitability and imposing a financial cost from the safety equipment.
We talk about the struggling NHS, and I should declare that I am a member of the BMA and a registered medical practitioner. There is serious concern that the NHS already cannot cope with what is being presented to it at the moment. The whole medical workforce is worried about the European working time directive, the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations, and the right to equal pay between men and women and other EU laws around equality being abandoned. One of the problems when the European working time directive came in was that, suddenly, people found that they all had to work differently. I caution against anyone thinking there is any merit at all in going back to the bad old days when I was a junior doctor and we worked 108 hours a week. There were times when we were so tired that we certainly made a lot of mistakes, and we know that our clinical workforce is already on its knees.
Those are just some examples of pieces of legislation which, at the moment, people are worried about possibly being lost in the transfer and not being preserved. It becomes difficult to understand why—if it applies to the Defra legislation—it is not the default to retain EU legislation and then slowly work through it afterwards to decide what will go, because the health and social care costs are probably vastly greater than anyone has yet estimated.