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It is high time the HSE owned up to the real scale of work-related road risks.
It is high time the HSE owned up to the real scale of work-related road risks.
Last week it once again announced official statistics for workplace deaths that omitted road crashes and thus ignored as many as five out of six deaths at work.
The HSE claimed the UK's tally of 228 working deaths last year gives Britain the "best record" in Europe for work-related fatalities.
But an almost-buried footnote to its press release briefly stated that the official figures "do not include incidences of road traffic accidents related to work which resulted in deaths".
Why does the HSE believe that up to a thousand work-related deaths (its own estimate) should be left out of the official record simply because they occur on the roads?
It is now five whole years since the HSE published its estimate of a thousand deaths per year from work-related road crashes. That is five years in which it has ducked the responsibility for bringing the full scale of workplace deaths and injuries to the attention of the public.
A busy boss who only sees the headline figure of 228 deaths a year is almost certain to assume it includes working drivers killed in crashes. If they do, any conclusions they draw about the level of risk to their own company's drivers will be dangerously optimistic.
Many, many thousands of employers and drivers are blissfully unaware of the real seriousness of occupational road risks, but the HSE's attitude to its official statistics deeply undermines any attempts by responsible organisations and businesses in the fleet industry to raise awareness of the need for more road risk management.
I can understand the absence of firm statistical data on work-related crashes makes it technically difficult to include them in the official annual statistics, but the problem is so severe that even an official estimate would be better than the current embarrassed silence from our guardians of workplace safety.
In any case, changes to police procedures for recording and classifying road crashes in the last two or three years should already have given the HSE enough data to make a close estimate of the number of drivers and other road users killed in crashes involving someone driving at work.
What we badly need now is for someone in Whitehall or Westminster to summon up the political will to tell the whole truth. People will be shocked by the figures but the road safety benefits would be huge, especially for the tens of thousands of firms and millions of drivers who are being lulled into a false sense of security by the HSE's very partial headline statistics.
Is saving lives worth some short-lived political pain?
Or is it more important for the HSE to ignore four out of five fatalities so that it can go on claiming the UK's record is somehow the "best in Europe"?
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