Hi Ray, I saw your posting earlier today but could not post a response until now. I read with interest the piece in the Western Mail (the National Newspaper of Wales) which stated that the figures for Wales were at a five year high caused by the Gleision Colliery and the Chevron oil refinery which resulted in the loss of eight lives. Taking those accidents out of the mix there were ten fatalities in Wales last year an improvement on the average of 11 over the previous five years. I have not read the figures yet and am waiting for the stats to become available on the net, but the comments of Judith Hackitt are quite right, she said "These are lives cut short, not statistics - every single one of these deaths will have caused terrible grief and anguish for family and friends as well as workmates and colleagues, this is the real tragedy of health and safety failures - lives cut short and loved ones lost." Is that not why we work in this much maligned sector to try and reduce this terrible burden that the UK Government has labelled as over the top and unneeded obstruction to making a profit!!!

Ray, I'm not drawing any firm conclusions from these figures although the 2009/10 dip may just have been a statistical anomaly. 175 lost lives is dreadful but this figure excludes work-related road traffic deaths and military deaths, making the real fatal results of working for UK employers very much higher. Losing a loved one in this way must be awful but so too must be the anguish and suffering brought about by work-induced disease, illness and injuries. A death is headline-making; tumours, breathlessness, amputations, deafness, chronic pain etc etc continue for a period of time and arguably cause more "cost" to us all. At the risk of sounding trite, each of us needs to remember what we seek to achieve i.e. an environment where work-related harm is prevented from occurring and what the results of failure mean.

Sorry Claire, I was under the impression it was a 'discussion' forum.

Ray I think we need to see the overall RIDDOR stats to get a better feel as to whether HSE and LA cuts are linked to deterioration in accidents. What the Government appears to be ignoring is the official stats on the costs of accidents and ill health, even if the latest figures have been massaged to ignore legacy costs and those of e.g. cancers.

We really need to look at and compare statistics over a number of years in order to properly identify trends regarding workplace deaths. Wasn't an annual toll of over 1000 workplace deaths in the early 1970s identified in the Robens Report? Whatever the figure was, the long term trend since those times has been a notable reduction. (If the figures included deaths at work offshore, the 167 deaths caused by the Piper Alpha Disaster in 1988 would have produced a very significant statistical blip in the trend.) It’s probably difficult to identify agree which factors have been the most influential in the overall reduction, e.g. possibly more effective enforcement by HSE and LA inspectors, more people working in OS&H and in more effective ways, changes in the numbers of people at work or a major decline in industries with dangerous occupations such as coal mining. As david bannister mentioned at #4, even one death at work tends to be newsworthy, at least for a short time, and is readily quantifiable. By contrast, other adverse effects of work such as injury (temporary and permanent) and disease (physical and mental) by their nature can be difficult to quantify. This is especially the case for some chronic diseases, e.g. asbestos-related ones, which might not become apparent until after the persons affected by them have retired. Also, such cases are rarely newsworthy. The exceptions tend to be those which are the subject of hearings in court, e.g. inquests and claims for compensation. However, most media reports about inquests involving occupational diseases consist of little more than a few paragraphs in local papers. Even so, the collective financial and other costs for taxpayers, businesses and individuals of the adverse effects of work which do not involve sudden death will be enormous. Using the analogy of an iceberg, such effects could be considered as a massive but hidden adverse component of work when compared with workplace deaths which are relatively few in number and 'visible' via media coverage. This is not intended as a play-down of workplace deaths. Though there may be fewer of them nowadays, every single one remains a tragedy for the reasons clearly outlined in the words of Judith Hackitt as quoted by Bob Shillabeer at #2.