Government puts money before lives, warns Prospect

Neil Hope-Collins, chair of Prospect’s HSE branch, has warned that at present workers in the UK are 11 times more likely to be killed by their job than by homicide. But despite this statistic, in the period 2002-06 the Financial Services Authority saw a 25% increase in staff while HSE reduced staff numbers by a tenth. In the last year alone, courts awarded average fines of £216,000 – excluding one in excess of £13m – for breaches of FSA regulations, compared with an average fine of just under £30,000 for health and safety offences. Hope-Collins says: “What kind of civilised society was Gordon Brown talking about when he referred to health and safety being a cornerstone of that society? A society where the watchdog for financial regulation receives more funding to deal with 23,000 firms than HSE receives to deal with over 300,000 firms. And one which imposes greater fines on firms that break financial rules than it imposes on firms that break people?” Cuts in funding have already forced HSE to shed between 250-300 jobs by 2008 to stay in budget. The situation looks set to deteriorate further if government efficiency savings of 15% imposed on HSE’s parent body, the Department for Work and Pensions, are passed on. Said Hope-Collins: “HSE’s reaction to a shrinking budget and shrinking workforce is to decrease the amount of investigation and enforcement and use ‘intermediaries’ and ‘stakeholders’ who do not have legislative backing. Provisional figures for 2007 already show an increase in fatalities across the construction industry and we fear this will be reflected across other divisions. But it is not too late to stop the rot.” Prospect is calling for all advocates of health and safety to raise the issue with MPs and ensure HSE receives adequate funding in the next spending round to cut Britain’s accident rate at work.