Comment

Comment: the misconception underpinning the Policy Exchange's report into the industry

In the first in a series of comment articles for Connect, Simon Cordall looks at why the central thrust of the recent report from the Policy Exchange is misguided.  

Before starting work on this piece, I tried a very quick experiment. I simply punched the words “Health”, “Safety”, “Gone” and “Mad” into Google, which returned a thoroughly depressing 603,000 results. It’s a very clear indicator that the lazy tabloid perception of the health and safety industry still holds sway and it’s this very perception that seems to undercut the Policy Exchange’s recent report into the industry.

There’s a myth doing the rounds, fuelled by ill-informed journalism, that would have us believe that UK business is, on a daily basis, forced to stagger along under an ever-increasing burden of unnecessary and wasteful safety regulation. The simple truth is this isn’t the case. The Better Regulation Executive (BRE) estimates in its report Improving Outcomes from Health & Safety that businesses, on average, spend less than four minutes a day dealing with health and safety concerns. It’s when you compare that brief period of time against the 29.3 million days lost last year due to injury or work-related ill health that you get some idea of the yawning gap between perception and reality.

Identifying examples of bad safety management in practice is not difficult, but surely it’s this exact issue which most powerfully undermines the points raised in the Policy Exchange’s recently published report. Bad safety practice is indeed cumbersome, ineffective and, by its very nature, open to ridicule. Good safety practice, however – the kind of practice promoted by organisations such as IOSH and the HSE – is based on managing risk in a responsible manner.

The role of consultants in achieving good practice cannot be underestimated. The right consultant can offer businesses a credible and knowledgeable resource. Given this, rather than criticise the number of health and safety consultants, perhaps it would be better to give some thought to the qualifications and experience of the consultants in question.

It’s at this stage that I should hold up my hand and admit to a degree of bias. Some years ago, while still a commercial manager, I was given the job of overseeing the overhaul of my company’s UK safety programme. Having, at that time, limited experience in safety management, like many managers and companies, my first step was to bring in an external consultant. My experience of dealing with that consultant, and those I’ve encountered since, couldn’t have been further removed from the impression given in the Policy Exchange’s report. Looking back, my naiveté with regard to safety matters was only matched by the scale of my budget and, overall, the situation might have presented rich pickings for the kind of self-serving and cynical consultant the Policy Exchange’s report supposes to be the norm. In fact, the entire focus of our external consultant and, consequentially, the whole project, was to examine our existing systems and to create practical safety measures that would both work alongside, and complement, those systems.

It became clear early on that rather than burdening our workers with excessive duties that would distract them from completing their daily tasks, we were looking to create practical measures that would help them achieve their goals and, ultimately, impact positively on the company’s bottom line. Such was the success of that project that as soon as the role of internal consultant became available, I applied myself.

It’s exactly this kind of experience that lies behind IOSH’s proposal for all health and safety consultants to have at least met the criteria for Chartered membership. This is perhaps the most credible proposal for improving the way in which current safety legislation is implemented. By improving the standard of advice offered by consultants, rather than criticising the number of consultants that exist, we might actually create a partnership between businesses and consultants that would make a significant contribution to reducing the very expensive 29.3 million lost working days mentioned above.

A further suggestion in the Policy Exchange report is that, rather than allowing duty holders to interpret the level of risk involved within their business and to manage that risk in a manner they consider “reasonably practicable”, the range of responses to a perceived risk should be fixed at a more limited set of degrees. In practical terms, deeming a safety measure as “reasonably practicable” in relation to the circumstances has, through the years, allowed businesses and safety professionals a degree of flexibility that has served them, and industry, well. Removing this would only serve to increase the supposed burden this report is designed to diminish.

Once more, we are left with the issue of the qualifications of the person responsible for adapting legislation to circumstance and we come back to the same duty holder as before. Each one seeks to do their best to interpret legislation as best they can and to manage the risk within their own working environment; however, under the Policy Exchange’s recommendations they would be equipped with a reduced number of options with which to do so. In short, it’s a very long route to getting back to where we started from.

The UK presently has one of the best health and safety records in Europe. Rather than celebrate this fact, the Policy Exchange report would have us discard the very reasons for it. Can the current situation be improved? Of course it can. However, any real improvement has to come about by building upon the current framework and increasing the overall level of understanding of how the present system can increase business growth and drive bottom line profitability. If achieving these ends involves bringing in an external consultant, then surely the most efficient and least burdensome way of doing this is to make sure that any consultant is an accredited professional with the qualifications and experience to properly advise businesses.

Ultimately, the central thrust of the Policy Exchange’s report is misguided. The current framework with which we manage safety isn’t the monstrous and burdensome ogre of popular myth. Rather it’s an effective and efficient means of allowing businesses to build their own safety systems that reflect and complement their own circumstances. Raising awareness of that fact and educating people about the benefits of investing themselves in that process must surely be our next challenge.

The thoughts and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and are not necessarily shared by IOSH.

Biography:

Simon Cordall qualified as an internal safety consultant for a US owned multinational company in 2006, specialising in providing labour to the construction industry. He has since gained work experience in Canada and California. Simon also has considerable experience of working with local authorities, and individual Members of Parliament, in championing the construction industry’s CSCS programme (Construction Skills Certification Scheme). He has authored numerous implementation programmes as well as gained extensive experience of dealing with external consultants.