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The Health and Safety Executive was in the hot seat this week. Safety inspections and prosecutions have slumped. Work-related deaths are rising...
The Health and Safety Executive was in the hot seat this past week. Safety inspections and prosecutions have slumped. Work-related deaths are rising.
The House of Commons' Works and Pensions Committee called the HSE's chief executive in to explain. It makes interesting listening.
The HSE's failure to carry out inspections surely sends a mixed message to those fleets that are trying hard to comply with the law.
On the one hand, no-one welcomes the idea of officious inspectors rummaging through their safety policies and driver records, even if they are all in order.
But on the other, if everyone knows there's virtually no chance of being caught, there's no incentive for the bad guys to mend their ways - until someone is killed or badly hurt, that is.
The HSE's excuse to the committee was that prosecutions demand more of its resources these days (even though it currently only carries out half as many as it used to). As a result, it's had to cut back on inspections.
Cutting back on proactive accident prevention seems to me to be a recipe for more accidents. Which would mean, presumably, more prosecutions. And therefore even fewer inspections. That starts to look like systemic failure.
Through all this, as I've said before, there is the glaring fact that the HSE doesn't even count work-related road deaths and injuries in official statistics. It only counts the 200 workers killed in factories, farming and so on - not the 1000 people who, it estimates, die each year in 'at-work' road crashes.
Never mind the bad guys, it's time for the HSE to mend its ways.
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