HSE What's Going Wrong

[brothermagrew]

Fewer than 1 in every 15 major injuries at work now result in a Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigation. Justice suffers too, with absolutely no HSE enforcement action in almost 98 per cent of cases. But Tory plans to give firms a get-out-of-jail card could make a bad situation much, much worse, Hazards editor Rory O’Neill warns.

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[Headbanger]

I think it is jointly the employer and the HSE to blame.

A safety expert said 'The best place to kill somebody is at work'.

This is not a crass statement but one based on the many years this expert has dealt with numerous 'accidents' at work.

It is a very difficult thing to prove the employer was to blame and it is especially complicated when the accident report submitted contains several 'errors' which create a conflict. It is this conflict that puts the already overstretched HSE on the defensive and subsequently reluctant to investigate.

Personal experience has shown an employer can report what they want artificially creating a conflict long enough to put HSE off and then admitting an 'error' once the coast is clear. All too often this has consequences for the injured party.

As many will know it is impossible for the HSE to investigate all accidents yet it is this reluctance to enter into conflict with the employer that has led to fewer and fewer accidents being investigated.

[brothermagrew]

I think it is jointly the employer and the HSE to blame.

A safety expert said 'The best place to kill somebody is at work'.

This is not a crass statement but one based on the many years this expert has dealt with numerous 'accidents' at work.

It is a very difficult thing to prove the employer was to blame and it is especially complicated when the accident report submitted contains several 'errors' which create a conflict. It is this conflict that puts the already overstretched HSE on the defensive and subsequently reluctant to investigate.

Personal experience has shown an employer can report what they want artificially creating a conflict long enough to put HSE off and then admitting an 'error' once the coast is clear. All too often this has consequences for the injured party.

As many will know it is impossible for the HSE to investigate all accidents yet it is this reluctance to enter into conflict with the employer that has led to fewer and fewer accidents being investigated.

I would rather suggest that this part says it all:

If you thought your life being shattered would at least prompt an official investigation, you’d be wrong. Figures obtained exclusively by Hazards show that in 2007/08, just 7.3 per cent of the 32,810 fatal and major injuries – or fewer than 1-in-every-13 – reported to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) resulted in an investigation by the watchdog.

For major injuries alone, the chances of an HSE investigation were lower still, with just 6.5 per cent investigated. We are not talking cuts and bruised here. We are talking being trashed – burned, losing limbs, being scalped. There’s a less than 1-in-15 chance they’ll result in any official probe.

And if it is justice you’re after, think again. In 2007/08, the most recent year for which finalised enforcement figures are available, 97.7 per cent of fatal or major injuries resulted in no HSE enforcement action, not even an improvement notice requiring measures by the employer to make the workplace safer.

For occupational diseases and dangerous occurrences, the picture is worse still. Less than 1-in-20 of the reports to HSE made under the RIDDOR reporting regulations in 2007/08 were investigated by the watchdog. Less than 1 per cent led to enforcement action.

HSE’s defence is that more time is now spent on “frontline activity”, up from 184,843 person days in 2006/07 to 209,242 in 2007/08. But this lumps in with inspection and enforcement work the resources spent on activities including “preparation for and attendance at agricultural shows, lectures, and other awareness-raising activities” and “standards-setting work”. The inspection trend, with HSE field inspector numbers dipping markedly in recent years, has fallen dramatically and taken enforcement action down with it (Hazards 104).

It is a situation described by criminal law experts Steve Tombs and Dave Whyte as the “collapse of enforcement”. In a paper published online on 13 October 2009 in the British Journal of Criminology [1], they note: “Investigations and inspections have fallen at an unprecedented rate as political and resource pressures have taken their toll on the day-to-day work of the inspectorate; the percentage falls in enforcement activities, already from low absolute levels, can hardly be described as anything other than a collapse.

“The extent of this decline would simple not be sustainable in most other areas of law enforcement – imagine the efforts of a Chief Constable, for example, to defend declines in investigations of violent interpersonal assault, or falls in prosecutions of apprehended burglars, where these certainly would be represented as a collapse in enforcement, which, no doubt would cause a political furore.”

The Conservative Party believes something needs to be done, and is intent on creating its own political furore around the issue. But rather than bolstering HSE and repairing a tottering regulator, it appears intent on dismantling it. A Conservative government would allow firms to opt-out from HSE inspections, with qualifying firms allowed to bar the watchdog from their premises. Instead the Tories are recommending an audit system modelled on the financial sector controls that gave us Enron, Madoff and that came within a bail-out of bringing the entire banking system to its knees.

A Tory policy document, ‘Regulation in the post-bureaucratic age’, [2] a Green Paper announced by shadow business secretary Ken Clarke at the party’s October 2009 conference, says “the powers of government inspectors will be drastically curbed” with firms allowed to arrange “their own, externally audited inspections instead.” Its aim of “taming regulators” would include “replacing regulator-run public teams of inspectors with a model closer to financial controls and audits.”