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Transcript : Face the Facts - 27 July 2007 |
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FACE THE FACTS
Health and Safety Executive
Presenter: John Waite
TRANSMISSION: Friday 27th July 2007 1230-1300
BBC RADIO 4
Waite
This week we investigate the Health and Safety Executive, the body set up by the government to protect workers' safety. We'll be hearing concerns, however, as one HSE inspector puts it - that it's a watchdog that's having its teeth filed down. The reason is money, or rather a lack of it. Cuts that have affected virtually the whole range of the Executive's activities. From the number of spot checks its inspectors make on potentially dangerous workplaces, to the number of employers who are prosecuted for putting their workers in harm's way. In fact, as we'll be revealing, cuts that mean that, these days, the vast majority - around 85% - of serious workplace accidents are simply not being investigated.
Montage
I didn't know what had hit me, I just hit the floor like a sack of potatoes, the pain was just unbearable. I got back up, put my hand to me face and blood just went everywhere.
He isn't what he was and the way I see it is they're not looking at what happened.
I am now more or less a burden on the health service and if I hadn't had the accident that wouldn't have happened.
Waite
Created more than 30 years ago, in 1974, the Health and Safety Executive was meant to be the chief enforcer of all the UK's health and safety legislation. Its remit would run everywhere from building sites to chemical plants, and from mines to fairgrounds. Places which had hitherto been largely self-regulating when it came to their safety practices - but where a worrying number of deaths and serious accidents had determined the government of the day that the sector needed policing before more workers were harmed. A new breed of inspectors snooping round the workplace - or prosecuting negligent companies - didn't obviously win approval from all those likely to be affected. But Professor Andrew Watterson - head of the Occupational and Environmental Health Research Group at Stirling University - says a dedicated safety executive was needed, and he was one of many who welcomed the HSE's arrival.
Watterson
Self regulation and voluntarism had failed in addressing many major health and safety at work problems and it was felt necessary, therefore, to have appropriate inspection and enforcement activities, linked to giving information and advice. And in the 1960s and 1970s there was a lot of activity on a whole range of health and safety issues, there were some very inspirational staff within the Health and Safety Commission and the HSE and they addressed major concerns that workers had which was clearly of benefit to everybody.
Waite
Right from the start, a key part of the HSE's role was to investigate why a serious accident had happened. If it had resulted in someone's death, the Executive ruled, it must be investigated. But it was also clear that - according to the HSE - equally as important were thorough investigations into all accidents which resulted in major injuries. That position hasn't changed. Indeed, a few years ago, the HSE produced a precise if rather grisly list for its inspectors of what the Executive defined as a "major injury".
Reading - HSE list
All amputations of digits passed the first joint. Loss of a hand, arm or foot, leg. Serious multiple fractures. Crash injuries leading to internal organ damage. Head injuries involving loss of consciousness. Burns and scolds covering more than 10% of the surface area of the body. Permanent blinding in one or both eyes. Any degree of scalping and asphyxiations.
Waite
A comprehensive catalogue of what constitutes a major injury that meant no HSE inspector could be in any doubt about what sort of serious accidents should prompt a formal investigation. Except that Face the Facts can reveal that, year on year, the number of serious accidents that by its own criteria the HSE should be investigating, is on the decline. Accidents that once would have prompted a swift response now just become another statistic. And that's worrying, says David Bergman, Chief Executive of the Centre for Corporate Accountability, a charity that promotes worker and public safety.
Bergman
Unless you do an investigation the state body - the Health and Safety Executive - the body in this country that has the powers to require companies and organisations that do particular things will not be able to identify the causes of that incident. And so unless the company on its own will decides to make changes then no changes will be made and therefore the conditions that resulted in the injury in the first place will remain.
Waite
And according to documents we have obtained - from what's known as the Field Operations Directorate - the largest operational inspectorate within the HSE - a major reason why numbers of serious accident investigations are down is because of "inadequate resources". And down quite sharply.
Three years ago, the HSE failed to investigate some 188 major accidents because of a lack of funds; last year, 255 incidents involving serious injury weren't investigated. And that's gone up again - to the latest figure of 307. So no lessons can be learned from any of those incidents because no HSE inspectors will have attended to highlight them. And it's when lessons are learned - working with the HSE - that lives can be saved and serious accidents prevented.
News Archive
BBC Radio Suffolk.
Good morning I'm Alison Acton. Accident investigators are at the British Sugar factory in Bury St Edmunds this morning where a woman was killed yesterday. Forty-year-old Lorraine Wasp from Great Finborough, near Stowmarket, was hit by a mechanical loading shovel. Workers at the factory are being offered counselling this morning.
Waite
Until 2003, British Sugar prided itself on an excellent safety record, but following a serious accident at one of its East Anglia plants, it was investigated by the HSE and subsequently fined almost half a million pounds. The company, however, devastated by what had been revealed about safety at its plants, then voluntarily spent another £7 million on a whole range of safety improvements. Being a responsible company, British Sugar was only too happy to work with the HSE to identify potential future risks at all of its four UK sites, including the largest one, at Wissington in Norfolk.
Well the British Sugar factory here is in fact the largest beet sugar factory in the world and it's a vast complex when you drive into it. It looks actually akin to a chemical factory, there are huge storage silos and all sorts of pipework. In fact in those giant towers that are looking down on me now, those seven sugar storage silos, there's a hundred thousand tonnes of crystal sugar at any one time, that's a hundred million one kilo packets.
Any such huge operation is potentially fraught of course with dangers to its workforce, which is why British Sugar's Operations Director, Karl Carter, was so keen to work closely with the HSE in the review of safety that followed the company's accident.
Carter
We've sit down with HSE and we've decided what the priorities actually are and we've worked through what we need to do to make sure that we've hit effectively what are the most sensitive areas of safety in our business.
Waite
And you've attempted haven't you to change the entire safety culture here?
Carter
Yeah we have and we have used HSE for that. The local inspector, Frank Sykes, has been extremely supportive. And the first benefit we got was very, very quickly, you know within 12-18 months we'd actually halved the incidents on site. HSE reportables again halved and that was just fundamental because we weren't that bad. So there was the real, real decrease in the number of incidents on site. And that's a huge benefit to any business and particularly ours because we haven't had that many people because it means people are on site - they're not sitting at home injured and why should they be. We're not paying them to be sick, we're not paying them out from an injury which would automatically get a claim and we're not having to employ someone else to do their job.
Waite
No death at a workplace can ever be ignored - and all fatalities such as the one at British Sugar are investigated thoroughly by the HSE. But hazards at work, of course, can still be revealed by less serious accidents which nevertheless result in major injury. They, though, as we've been reporting, are increasingly likely not to be looked into. Take the case of Keith Waring, an electrical engineer, who, five years ago, was perched on a ladder working on a house renovation and pulling out some old, external TV cables.
Waring
I pulled on the coaxial cable with one hand, it was tight, so I thought I'll just give it one jag two hands, which I did and it suddenly released and I started to overbalance backwards. And at that stage my actual feet must have been only eight, nine feet off the ground and rather than fall backwards I jumped back off the ladder. By the time I'd looked down to see where I was landing and flexing my knees I'd already landed and the pain started to get worse and luckily I had my mobile phone on me and I could ring for an ambulance.
Waite
Which raced Keith for initial treatment to the nearest hospital and where his injuries turned out to require extensive investigation.
Waring
I had to go to the x-ray department probably eight times and each time you went you're having to move over this way and the pain was absolutely terrible. And I just said I can't go no more, that's enough, I can't take no more. And at that stage they then put a plaster cast on both legs - the pain just disappeared then.
Waite
The pain may have gone but Keith's injuries were still very real and even more extensive than at first he realised. That only became clear when he was moved for more specialist attention to Sheffield's Northern General.
Waring
The consultant came to see me and said that I'd got to make some decisions. They found that the tibia not only was it broken but had been smashed into pieces. And because it seems the delay in getting the swelling down meant that these broken bones or these disintegrated bones hadn't had a good supply for several days and they'd died. And I asked him well what does that mean and he said well you've got one of two choices - we can cut your tibia just below your kneecap, move that down to the top of your foot and let it fuse on to the top of your foot then he says we'll grow the bones back underneath your kneecap to where this new tibia had been fused onto to the top of your foot. But what about my ankle? Oh he says you won't have an ankle. I said but what about movement in the ankle? Oh the foot - there will be none, it's just a solid joint, it's a stiff. Oh he said and the other thing is I cannot sit here and look you in the eye, he says, and promise you that it will work out fine. The other alternative is that we do what we call a trans-tibial amputation, which is below the knee amputation, now. And I said well I don't have to make a decision, it's made its own decision, I'm going for the second option which is below the knee. At least I've got a kneecap or a knee joint that I can use.
Waite
So Keith's accident, for which his employer accepted liability, resulted in him losing most of his lower left leg. He's also been warned by doctors that he could eventually lose a portion of his right one too. An accident, in other words, that has produced major injuries which HSE criteria stipulate must be investigated - and yet it wasn't. Even though the whole incident was reported to them. In fact, by law, any serious workplace accident, or an injury that results in an absence from work of more than three days, must be reported to the HSE by an employer. Who has to fill in a form describing precisely what happened, and including an assessment of the severity of the injury. It's those details that are supposed to ring warning bells at the HSE. However, as notification has to be done "without delay", the full impact of an accident - as with Keith's - may not be immediately apparent. Hence a system meant to flag up serious cases can in fact miss them, so once again they can go uninvestigated. There's also another problem with these forms. In filling them in, some unscrupulous employers simply minimise the seriousness of an incident so the HSE won't investigate. That's something David Urpeth - a personal injury lawyer with the firm Irwin Mitchell - says he sees all the time.
Urpeth
I had a case recently that had been played down significantly by the employer and when I got the letter back from the Health and Safety Executive saying look we didn't investigate, we didn't think it was serious enough, we took the view he wouldn't have been off for three days, I wrote back saying you know this is a guy that's suffered a head injury, he's very seriously injured, he's been off at least seven weeks, you ought to have a look at this. And they've reinvestigated that particular one.
Waite
And are we talking about scores or hundreds of inspections that once would have taken place and now should take place, according to people like you, but aren't?
Urpeth
It's increasing almost logarithmically, we're now into the hundreds and this is very, very concerning.
Waite
So, either through genuine ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation, employers don't always reflect accurately either what took place or how serious was the result. Yet trawling through these forms, HSE inspectors are meant to be looking for "trigger" words - like "multiple" fracture, rather than just "fracture"; "blinding" rather than merely "injury to eye". Words that will help them decide whether they should take a more detailed look at an incident. But then again forms can often be filled in by some one who wasn't actually present when the accident happened, or didn't have sufficient medical knowledge to assess the injuries accurately. Take the form, for example, concerning Neil Ringrose's accident. Neil works for a scaffolding company, delivering equipment to sites, where he sometimes helps the scaffolders who'll erect it.
Last year, handing up an aluminium beam to workers on some scaffolding above him, what's called a sway brace - an eight foot long metal tube - came loose and plunged down - Neil says "like a heavy metal spear" - straight into his upturned face. The resulting injury required him to be hospitalised, to undergo a series of reconstructive facial operations, and to be off work for a total of 17 weeks. None of which I certainly could have guessed by reading out the simple details submitted on his accident form.
What's the injury? Fracture. What happened? Taken to hospital.
Ringrose
Looking at that you'd think it's not a lot really. If you saw what actually happened to me it would be four pages thick.
Waite
And of course if they investigated what had happened to you and saw for themselves then they'd know that it was a much more serious incident than that bit of paper, from your employer, would make out.
Ringrose
If they'd had come to me I would have told them and showed them the hospital reports and things like that, it would have been a lot serious than what they'd put on that piece of paper.
Waite
Now you've got some pictures here that you've got up for me on your computer showing you a few days afterwards isn't it.
Ringrose
As you can see there's three lacerations, it's all bloody and me top eyelid is absolutely black.
Waite
Actually your eye's almost closed isn't it. And it does look as though your eye has slipped down a bit.
Ringrose
Yeah it's fell because the breaks what were in me face it's shattered it all round and my face has actually slipped about two and a half centimetres. So that's what the tube did - the damage where it cut me because it came down end first like a spear and hit me straight on the face.
Waite
So that had gone actually in your eye.
Ringrose
The specialist who did the operation has told me if it hit me in my eye I would have lost my eye and possibly brain damage or even killed me because it would have gone straight through my eye socket.
Waite
So why that sway brace, that eight foot long pole, that tube, that spear, as you described it, why it collapsed that was never investigated?
Ringrose
No it was never investigated, we just as far as I know just put to one side as an accident.
Waite
So whether it could happen again that was never investigated?
Ringrose
Oh no, it was never investigated and things like that will happen again because it hadn't been investigated and it's not been looked into.
Waite
But HSE inspectors are increasingly having to rely on "paper policing", as they call it, these days, like reading accident report forms, because budget cuts mean that they're increasingly at their desks being reactive rather being proactive out in the field. The HSE is funded by the Department for Work and Pensions. And, as we've heard, a lack of funds in recent years has meant several of its main tasks - including investigating serious accidents - have been curtailed. And things don't look any brighter in the future, as the Executive faces a further budget cut of 5% per year over the next three years.
As a result, the HSE has warned it might have to shed around 10% of its workforce - that's about 350 posts - by the end of next year. Not all of those will be inspectors, of course, but any job losses will clearly have yet a further impact on its usefulness, according to Mike Mcdonald, negotiations officer of Prospect, the trade union that represents inspectors and others within the HSE.
Mcdonald
The HSE has cut back on administrative support to avoid cutting inspector numbers and inevitably that results in inspectors having to do more administration and I think the general public would be concerned if they thought that inspectors were actually having to do administrative tasks due to a lack of resources. And therefore the amount of time available to inspectors to visit workplaces, to make checks and to enforce the law if necessary will be reduced.
Waite
Time and again in making this programme, we were told that morale in the Health and Safety Executive is at an all time low. These are the words of one inspector, who's been in the service for decades, but perhaps understandably didn't want to be identified.
Reading: HSE inspector
When I started the job some teams might have had eight inspectors in where we couldn't perhaps do everything that we wanted to do. You certainly notice the difference now because in some teams they're reduced to maybe two inspectors and that might possibly be one per county, so we're very, very stretched. People often contact us inquiring about their accidents and through lack of resource we're unable to investigate all of them.
Indeed virtually every enforcement activity of the HSE is on the decrease. And that includes spot checks of premises. A hands-on approach that was supposed to identify potential hazards and keep employers on their toes. Hugh Robertson is Head of Health and Safety at the TUC.
Robertson
If employers think that they're actually going to get a visit at any time, a spot check, they're more likely to make sure they do do risk assessments, they do take care of their employees. But the problem is the number of inspections has actually fallen considerably by about a half over 10 years. Now at the same time the number of premises the HSE is responsible for has increased considerably. So what we find is that now the average employer, who's inspected by the Health and Safety Executive, will get inspection about once every 11 years, which isn't exactly that much of a deterrent.
Waite
Indeed it isn't, according to Stephen Kay, and he should know as he's a serving HSE inspector with more than 20 years experience, and agreed to talk to us in his capacity as the vice chair of Prospect's Health and Safety Branch.
Kay
An inspector will now be out of the office maybe for a third of the time whereas 10, 15 years ago about half of their time was spent out of the office actually going out and inspecting and doing visits.
Waite
And what message do you think that sends to employers?
Kay
Well an employer might not see an inspector very often these days and that might mean that they start to get lax. They think well I've not had a visit for 5-10 years what are my chances of getting an inspection? So the chances of, you know, I guess you could make analogies with the speed cameras, if there's a speed camera you know you've got to slow down, if you've gone for a long, long time without seeing a speed camera then you're more likely to put your foot down. And I guess it's a bit similar with inspectors really - if you don't see an inspector for a long time are you likely to think well I'll maybe get away with it this time?
Watterson
If it carries on the way that it's doing I think it will be a case of the HSE de facto, in practice, disintegrating.
Waite
Professor Andrew Watterson again.
Watterson
Staff have disappeared, whole parts of the HSE have been run down, things have seriously deteriorated. It is death by a thousand cuts. More money, more resources need to go into it and if they don't then it's clearly not working, there's very significant disillusionment amongst the staff who are extremely hard working and there's growing disillusion coming from workers and worker organisations.
Waite
So is the Health and Safety Executive dying a death of a thousand cuts? Which will mean it can't even investigate hundreds of serious accidents every year. And only this week the latest figures show that the number of workplace fatalities in Britain is at a five year high. With its funding squeezed is the HSE able to cope? Its Chief Executive is Geoffrey Podger.
Podger
To be honest I'd say well actually HSE is very much alive and kicking. I think we have a lot of very good achievements to our name and I think we continue to make a great deal of progress. We investigate on our figures around 94% - I repeat again 94% - of the incidents which actually meet our criteria. And I would say in anyone's book that's a pretty high percentage. You're quite right to say - and it is always a concern of ours - that because we don't investigate [in inverted commas] "absolutely everything" we may miss something, that's always a worry of our inspectors and I quite understand why they have that worry, I have it as well. While at the same time we also have to think of the resources which would be diverted into looking into even more cases because the more you look into cases then the less proactive work you do. So it is a question of striking a balance.
Waite
But I mean this subject we're talking about - workers' safety - their very lives, perhaps, ride on the HSE remaining an effective policeman of workplace safety, that's what you were set up to do. Increasing numbers of people say you can't do it effectively enough because you're being starved of funds.
Podger
But I think as I've already indicated to you, first of all I'm quite clear that we are an effective policeman, the data reflects this.
Waite
You could be more effective.
Podger
But you come back then to an issue which again applies throughout the public service of organisations which could do more with more money. What we have to do is use our resources in the most effective way and that's frankly what we're committed to doing.
Waite
But inspectors say to us - and we've heard from some on the programme - that morale is low within the inspectorate, that they're having to spend more time at their desks, that they're not getting out there doing spot checks, doing full blown inspections like they used to and keeping rogue employers on their toes.
Podger
Quite inevitably if you're an inspector you're devoted to your job and you naturally can think of more things you could do if you had more resources but that's quite normal in any kind of enforcement body, you would find the same thing in the police, perhaps you already have done so. We and the management do have to take a view as to how we direct our resources and sometimes that means saying to people that actually we think there's a better combination of how we might use our resources than actually investing purely in the inspection area.
Waite
And what is that better way forward - are convictions up?
Podger
Convictions in fact run at around 73% of the cases we bring. The cases we bring are indeed up, we're actually bringing around a quarter - 25% - more prosecutions in the last year than we did the previous year. We're serving more notices, that includes prohibition notices. So actually we have a lot of enforcement activity going on. But I do stress again to you it's quite wrong to take the view that health and safety in this country is purely an issue about the resourcing of the Health and Safety Executive. The key thing which above all else will make the difference is what happens in the workplace and the legal duty there rests with the employer and it's an area where employees have a very key role to play.
Waite
But not employees like Keith Waring or rather ex-employee, following his serious accident, which involved losing a leg but which was never investigated by the HSE. For him Mr Podger's reassuring words have a very hollow ring.
Waring
I am now more or less a burden on the health service and if I hadn't had the accident that wouldn't have happened. Of course I'm no longer contributing to society because I'm no longer working.
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