Posted By Dave Wilson
Just been reading this from the Hazards www
So lots less visits next year then? On the face of it this sounds really bad for worker protection in the UK what do you think?
Savage cuts at HSE
At the same time ailing workers are being urged to get up and work, measures to ensure they return to safe and healthy workplaces are going down the pan. Earlier this year Hazards warned exclusively that HSE was “in danger” as a series of accounting blunders and cutbacks left it facing a funding crisis (Hazards 95). This warning was confirmed in a 10 August 2006 message to HSE staff from chief executive Geoffrey Podger which said HSE needed “to reduce in total by some 250-350 posts between now and March 2008.” Within two years, HSE will lose up to 9 per cent of its staff.
It is not just jobs that are being axed. To make £5.6m in cuts – the saving HSE needs to make over two years after it managed to move from a budget underspend to a considerable and unsanctioned overspend in just one year – it has cut £3m from its planned publicity budget, £1.3m from its science and technology spend and £250,000 from contracted out policy work. A £1m contribution from “underspend” to Workplace Health Connect was withdrawn after it became apparent HSE had someone managed to change this into a massive and unsanctioned overspend. The prospect of funding for further worker involvement initiatives like the Worker Safety Adviser programme has also evaporated.
HSE is facing a future with too few staff and too few resources to do its job. Sources within HSE have told Hazards, for example, that the 2006/2007 travel and subsistence budget for field inspectors is likely to run out in February. If that happens, they will only be able to inspect those workplaces in walking distance of the office.
An October 2006 TUC briefing(11) says: “HSE will by 2008 have lost around 17 per cent of the staff it had in 2002 when comparing like with like. On top of this, the pressure is set to get worse in this Autumn’s Comprehensive Spending Review if HSE’s parent department, the DWP, passes on its five per cent year on year cut to HSE (not including the impact of rising inflation on the HSE budget).” TUC adds that HSE can’t maintain its expertise because it can’t afford to recruit suitably skilled individuals. The impact on enforcement is considerable.
“Around 85 per cent of major injuries reported to HSE are never investigated (and there are known to be large numbers that never even get reported),” the report says: “There is only so much that the 500 or so inspectors in HSE’s Field Operations Division (FOD) can achieve. This means that very serious career-ending accidents go unpunished simply because there is no one to gather the evidence. The number of prosecutions is now half what it was in the early 1990s – this simply means that more employers are getting away with it, not that they are more compliant.”
HSE gutted
Even gutting HSE comes at a price. HSE has budgeted £1.5m to cover the cost of pushing 30 workers out the door on voluntary early retirement by the end of March 2007. If the costs are broadly similar for all the 250-350 jobs for the chop, measures to meet a £5.6m budget shortfall will cost the Treasury between £12.5m and £17.5m. Given the shortfall was the result of a serious but one-off budgeting cock up, many will think keeping much needed workers in post and just plugging the funding gap would have made better economic and organisational sense.
Even before the job losses hit, inspections, notices, prosecutions, convictions and contact time have all plummeted (Hazards 95). An August 2006 internal memo reporting the findings of an audit of HSE’s formal enforcement activity concluded “there was no evidence of over-zealous behaviour,” instead observing that if the Health and Safety Commission’s Enforcement Policy Statement had been followed, “then the number of prosecutions would have been considerably greater than was actually the case. The implications of this need to concern us all.”
Fewer than one in every thousand reported workplace accidents results in a prosecution. Figures released on 2 November(1) showed there had been a further dramatic reduction in enforcement activity. In 2005/06 there were 1,012 offences prosecuted, a 23 per cent drop from 1,320 the previous year.
The cutbacks also have implications for HSE’s work on occupational disease prevention. TUC reports very few cases of occupational disease are ever investigated. In the early 1990s HSE employed around 50 occupational physicians. Now has just seven, despite a legal duty to maintain an Employment Medical Advisory Service.
HSE is yet to provide full costings or explain, publicly or to the Health and Safety Commission, how the catastrophic funding blunders occurred or who is responsible. So far, no-one has been disciplined despite a number of HSE board members having been party to decisions which have seen HSE lose hundreds of staff and a large slice of its revenue budget for the next two years.