Join the battle against darkness

The intergalactic battle betwixt the forces of darkness and light is about to mobilise us Earthlings… again.

Though this tussle isn’t likely to involve Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker (he’s yet to respond to our letters), you can bet your bottom drachma that sabres will soon be swooshing/rattling in the labyrinthine corridors of the Death Star – I mean Parliament.

That’s because the plan to give us Brits lighter evenings all year round – by adopting Single/Double Summer Time (GMT+1 in winter and GMT+2 in summer) – is about to be debated by MPs… again.

You may recall that in December a Private Members’ Bill, put forward by Rebecca Harris MP, passed its second reading in the House of Commons with a huge majority.

Once we’d stopped jumping up and down and punching the air we realised there were still a few more mountains to climb. The next Everest will see the PMB go before a committee of all-party MPs. This stage is as crucial as it is imminent.

If Ms Harris’s Bill eventually conquers all, it will lead to the Government carrying out a cross-departmental analysis of the benefits of SDST – which in turn could trigger a three-year trial.

Why, you might wonder, are we getting so hot under the collar about fiddling with the clocks?

RoSPA has been at the forefront of the crusade to bring brighter nights to the UK for decades – citing research that shows they would save 80 lives and prevent more than 200 serious injuries on the roads each year.

A look in the rear-view mirror is quite disturbing. We estimate that about 5,000 deaths and 30,000 serious injuries have been caused needlessly in the UK since a similar, three-year experiment was concluded in 1971.

In addition to the avoidance of grief, suffering and hardship, another positive consequence of fewer road accidents would be considerable annual savings to taxpayers.

The Department for Transport estimated in 2009 that it would only cost £5 million to implement Single/Double Summer Time – but would save more than £138 million every year thereafter.

Some of the other benefits of SDST include a cut in annual CO₂ emissions by nearly 500,000 tonnes, and a boost to the UK tourism industry of up to £3.5 billion per year – as well as more opportunities for people to play sport and to enjoy outdoor activities.

You can do your bit to convince the UK’s movers and shakers of this plan’s worthiness by clicking the big, red “Support Our Campaign” button on our campaign website.

Cliché alert: We need your force to be with us on this one!

Michael Corley, RoSPA’s campaigns manager

Further thoughts on the Löfstedt Review

Following my previous blog post, it’s time to further develop some thoughts on the Löfstedt Review and the issues surrounding it.

What made the HSW Act and the post-Robens architecture different from the earlier Factories Act law was not just its goal setting nature, bounded by “reasonable practicability”, but its attempt to describe the essential ingredients for arriving at and sustaining safe systems of work in an organisational setting.

In other words, it was not just a long list of dos and don’ts related to particular hazards. In a suitably general way, it set out the people/policy/procedures needed to ensure that hazards were routinely identified, risks assessed, appropriate controls applied and refined – taking into account advances in knowledge and lessons from operational experience.

Thus, where earlier law had sought only to prescribe measures to be taken in various (actually quite limited) settings, the 1974 Act – later augmented by the Management of Health and Safety at Work (MHSW) Regulations – tried to indicate what employers needed to do to be able to work this out for themselves, using risk assessment and supported by competent people/advice, consultation with workers and so on.

In theory, regulations and guidance introduced later to regulate specific risks and activities were designed to support this underlying core. In reality, however, what we now have is architecture of law that is actually quite untidy, incomplete and is not easy to understand in detail without going on a training course and/or reading quite a lot of guidance! (This is just as true, of course, of law relating to other aspects of business such as employment, tax, planning, environment etc. Most business owners/managers do not read raw, undigested health and safety law but refer to guidance or seek professional advice.)

And, of course, law and guidance on their own provide only part of the answer since legally-required systems and risk control measures alone (even when supported by detailed requirements) are not enough to guarantee desired outcomes.

To ensure the “fine fit” between systems/standards and operational reality you also need an effective health and safety culture. We also need effective systems of promotion, education, training, advice, and support to enable smaller businesses particularly to respond effectively. And we also need enforcement to deal with the criminally non-compliant. Good law is clearly necessary but it is far from sufficient to deliver safe and healthy working conditions.

The challenge I believe Professor Löfstedt faces in conducting his review is not only to show how we can return to the essence of the Robens vision, stripping out a lot of the confusing duplication and overlap of duties in the different sets of regulations (without reducing essential protections), but how – in practical terms – we can deal with the challenges smaller firms in particular face in responding to goal-setting law.

For example, it is just as important that his team looks at other issues like the overall health and safety support system for SMEs in the UK and what can be done to make this more effective and coherent. He may also like to look at the role of third party semi-regulators such as clients, main contractors, insurers, assurers etc., and perhaps take a look at the case for some sort of rapid, independent appeal process to deal with any incidences of over-the-top requirements that they might impose.

The Government will insist, with justification, that any proposals pass what is called “the small firms test”. There is continuing debate about whether there really is some sort of size threshold in today’s business below which ideas about formal risk management have no meaning in practice. It is often said that small firms “run” their businesses, whereas large firms “manage” them – and small firms are not just large ones that haven’t got big yet!

What we and most other stakeholders in the health and safety system continue to argue is that it is the level of risk to workers (and others) and not the organisation’s size that must be the guiding principle. So Prof. Löfstedt and his advisers need to begin at the beginning and consider if we do indeed have a clear set of goal-setting risk duties in law which reflect the different elements in the risk management challenge, and which are applicable to all organisations. At present these are scattered across the top of the legal structure and do not flow logically downwards and outwards in other subsidiary law and guidance. Some, like risk assessment, are repeated at several levels. Other really important ones like investigation and organisational learning from incidents are not very clear at all.

So if they are to approach their commission professionally, what Professor Löfstedt and his colleagues will need to consider at the outset is whether current risk management duties in law are both understandable and truly “scalable” in different settings. If there are gaps, then these need to be identified, together with ideas as to how they might be filled in the most appropriate way.

Only then will it be meaningful to look at how to brigade more effectively the large amount of regulatory detail that has accumulated since 1974, and after 1992 in particular. Anything else, such as just trying to return to the letter of particular directives (often unworkable in a UK setting) runs the risk of just tinkering at the edges for political effect and creating even less clarity.

The same breadth of vision and depth of understanding are needed to deal with the final part of the review about the legal position of employers in cases where employees act in a grossly irresponsible manner. Nobody sets out to have an accident but on occasion some employees do, for various reasons, act with disregard for their own or others’ health and safety. Professor Löfstedt and his panel members will need to do their homework here too, avoiding crude behaviourist models of safety management which see accidents as being caused mainly by “unsafe workers” and immerse themselves in excellent HSE publications such as HSG48 Reducing error and influencing behaviour to help get causation factors in perspective.

I would urge all readers to watch this space and feed in their ideas to the review as it proceeds. Email: review.healthandsafety@dwp.gsi.gov.uk.

Roger Bibbings, RoSPA’s occupational safety adviser

Climbing for RoSPA with STEP UK

RoSPA would like to thank Arlena Kuenzel, co-chair of the Leicester division of STEPUK and medical student, for her guest blog this week. She and two fellow students decided to undertake some fundraising for RoSPA by taking part in the three peaks challenge.

Here is their story!

After STEPUK (the Society for Trauma, Emergency Medicine/Nursing and Pre-Hospital Care United Kingdom) advertised a three peaks challenge in aid of RoSPA, I decided to find out a bit more about the work that RoSPA undertakes.

It was with great interest that I learnt about their achievements within accident prevention and I was motivated to take up the challenge and help to raise money for the charity. Accident prevention is vitally important and, as a medical student, I have had the unfortunate experience of seeing traumatic injury from what could have been preventable events on too many occasions.

L-R: Arlena Kuenzel, Michael Coulton, Tom Mullarkey, Tim Williamson, John Ly

When I first signed up to the three peaks challenge, I did not anticipate quite how great the challenge would actually be though….

Meeting up with the rest of the team and realising that I was one of only two girls in the group made me think that I probably should have done a bit more training than I had done before setting out to walk the three peaks!

The first journey to Mount Snowdon was filled with excitement and we were all raring to get started. It also allowed us to get to know each other as a team a bit better.

Once we crossed the border to Wales and found our campsite, we all worked together to get the tents up as quickly as possible. Not wanting to make too much work for ourselves, we also made use of the minibus as a makeshift tent… a less than comfortable night!

Early next morning, we got going on the first of the three peaks. We made good pace but had enough time to appreciate the beauty of the sunrise. While we could all have done with a nice sit down and a cup of tea after our initial burst of enthusiasm, we found the café on Mount Snowdon had been closed for refurbishment. Luckily we had brought plenty of supplies with us so made frequent stops to refuel on food and water.

After getting to the top and back down again we decided to get going to Scafell Pike straight away so as not to lose any time, as the clock was ticking on our challenge.

Once we got there, it soon became apparent that I had been using all sorts of muscles that I had forgotten I had! Needless to say, getting going again was a bit of a struggle! With time limited, we had to push on though.

We seemed to be walking for an age but looking back at our path and still being able to make out where we had parked our minibus, made me realise just how much further we still had to go. As we were collecting money for RoSPA along the way, it meant that we were able to keep our spirits high by talking with the public about STEPUK, RoSPA and our fundraising efforts. The last part of Scafell Pike was a scramble to the top along loose rocks – I think we were all more than a little relieved once we reached the summit! Now we just had to get back down…

A fitting reward!

We did eventually make it back to the minibus and got going to our next destination – northbound to Scotland. Here we went in search of some hot food. As it was late in the evening, finding somewhere was far trickier than we had anticipated and it provided us with a whole new challenge! After several failed leads, and nearly giving in to just grabbing some snacks from the service station, we found a take-away in one of the Scottish towns. Still wearing our walking gear and looking somewhat worse for wear certainly made us stand out from the other customers there!

Having satisfied our hunger we thought it would be a nice quick drive up to the place we planned to camp near Ben Nevis. All that changed when we were faced by flashing blue lights and found out there was a road block. A quick chat with the police officer dashed any hopes of using that road for a good few hours.

Being tired from the day’s walking, we nearly camped at the roadside then and there but decided it would be best to persevere. All credit to our driver who found a detour and got us to Ben Nevis in the early hours of the night. There were a few more people making use of the minibus to sleep in that night but we pulled together to put up tents for everyone who was unable to fit into the bus.

Things looked brighter in the morning and we set off for our last peak. The brightness of the morning did not last long though and we came across the worst of the weather we had encountered so far on our challenge… and it was getting worse the higher up the mountain we went. A hailstorm welcomed us as we reached the top. Luckily we were so elated that we had made it that the weather did not dampen our spirits.

Michael Coulton, Tom Mullarkey, RoSPA’s chief exec, and Arlena Kuenzelat the RoSPA Awards

After brief celebrations at the summit with the rest of the team and also other hikers, we decided it would be best to make a speedy descent to avoid staying cold and wet for too long. A few of us decided to use the last of our energy and run down. This initially seemed like a good idea to me but soon became more difficult when my shoes decided that they had had enough from all this walking and the sole started hanging off. We did make it to the pub at the bottom where we had a nice warm drink and some food and then all that was left was the long drive back to Leicester.

All in all, it was a weekend full of ups and downs but I came away with a great sense of achievement and made good friends along the way!

A few months later we were approached by RoSPA to present at the annual Occupational Health and Safety Awards. It was an honour to work with the team at RoSPA and find out more about the good work that our fundraising has contributed to. Despite the nerves that come with talking in front of such a large audience, it was an incredible experience to be part of an event that recognised so many people’s dedication to saving lives.

By Arlena Kuenzel

More photographs are available on RoSPA’s flickr account.

Untangling the terms of the Löfstedt Review

Following on from my previous blog – Hazard and risk: understanding the difference – in which I talked about the Lord Young Review, the time is about right to look at what is happening next.

Chris Grayling, employment minister for the Department for Work and Pensions, has commissioned Professor Ragnar Löfstedt, director of the King’s Centre for Risk Management at King’s College London to chair a team of six people to consider the opportunities “for reducing the burden of health and safety legislation on UK businesses while maintaining the progress made in improving health and safety outcomes” and to report by this autumn. The team will comprise politicians, business people and employee representatives.

Professor Löfstedt’s review will be supported by a small team of DWP officials and will focus primarily on the approximately 200 statutory instruments and associated approved codes of practice rather than the Health and Safety at Work (HSW) Act itself or other primary legislation.

The professor has called for evidence from a range of stakeholders including government bodies; employers’ organisations; employees’ organisations; professional health and safety bodies; and academics. They will consider:

• The scope for consolidating, simplifying or abolishing regulations
• Whether the requirements of EU Directives are being unnecessarily enhanced (“gold-plated”) on translation into UK law
• If lessons can be learned from comparison with health and safety regimes in other countries
• Whether there is a clear link between regulation and positive health and safety outcomes
• If there is evidence of inappropriate litigation and compensation arising from health and safety legislation
• Whether changes to legislation are needed to clarify the legal position of employers in cases where employees act in an irresponsible manner.

RoSPA is feeding ideas into the review, but it is my opinion that the professor and his colleagues will need to commit to doing a lot of homework if they are to understand fully the background to what they have been asked to do. And if they do not co-ordinate closely with other “simplification” initiatives that are underway there is a real danger of confusion.

These initiatives include a wider project by the HSE looking at how it organises its overall range of guidance, including on health and safety management, as well as another Government initiative asking the public for ideas on how to cut so-called “red tape”, including in health and safety. Logically any attempt to revise and restructure the HSE guidance lexicon should perhaps await the outcome of the Löfstedt review.

Health and safety law is important. People’s lives and health depend on it. Any review needs to be undertaken professionally and carefully, without being rushed. It needs to be strategic, evidence-based and must carefully consider previous reviews of regulation and the results of consultation on particular regulations.

In particular Professor Löfstedt, members of his panel and DWP officials will need to go back and understand in some detail the history and evolution of our system of health and safety law and guidance, as the past and present are intimately connected. Core ideas in our law and guidance system about health and safety management go back a long way – to before the Robens Committee including, for example, the report of the Joint Industrial Council on Accident Prevention of 1956! Ideas about how to regulate and manage health and safety issues have an enduring DNA.

In theory there is supposed to be a logical flow from the general duties of care in the HSW Act, through the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations (MHSWR) to other specific hazard and sector related regulations. Guidance documents (which are what people actually read) then support all this. But, as everyone now admits, the elegance and logic that were envisioned in the 1972 Robens Report have been corrupted over time by adaptations to implement EC directives, and so on. Key duties like risk assessment, training and information are repeated at number of levels but others like monitoring and learning from incidents are weak if not missing altogether.

In terms of transparency and proportionality, health and safety law and supporting guidance needs to be focused on the “big” issues. In some hazard areas like chemicals and physical hazards, where the impact of an accident or incidence of ill health is immediate and visible, the law is well developed. However, in other areas such as those involving psychosocial risks (ergonomics, stress, violence etc. which affect millions of workers) it is still quite vague.

And, worryingly, huge areas of hazard like work-related road safety (more people are killed while at work on the road than in all other workplace accidents) are addressed only by the most generic guidance.

Arguably the balance between what is covered in regulation and what is addressed in guidance could be readjusted. On the other hand, options here have been limited. Much of the problem, in my view, has been due to our inability in the UK to use Approved Codes of Practice (ACoPs) to transpose EC directives. Robens had high hopes for ACoPs since they were intended to provide both authoritative advice and flexibility; but this vision was not shared.

On one side the TUC always thought ACoPs were too weak. The CBI on the other has always tended to view them as prescriptive regulation by the back door. And the European Commission refused to accept them as a vehicle for transposition of directives into national law anyway.

This whole debate ought to be revisited, and Professor Löfstedt’s review is the ideal time to do so.

This topic is too big and too important to squeeze into one short blog post – so stay tuned for part two. And don’t forget to join the debate – open and honest discourse on all sides is the best way to produce a national health and safety culture that the UK can be proud of.

Roger Bibbings, RoSPA’s occupational safety adviser

Safe at Home: A Two-Tier Success

Following on from Michael Corley’s recent blog post – Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics – about accident prevention, it seems that the topic of today’s blog post is entirely appropriate as an illustration of how accident prevention can work.

In 2009, RoSPA launched the Safe At Home scheme (funded by the former Department for Children, Schools and Families), which had the aim of reducing accident rates among under-fives through targeted support for families in 141 areas in England with the highest accident rates.

Support included the provision of home safety information and safety equipment, such as safety gates, fireguards and window restrictors, through a network of new and existing local home safety equipment schemes. RoSPA also trained staff working at the local schemes.

The scheme has been incredibly successful, exceeding its target of supplying safety equipment to 60,196 families. The final figures show that the total number of families to receive free equipment by March 31, 2011, when the scheme came to an end, was an impressive 66,127.

This type of venture is a great example of how the Government’s “Big Society” could work at its best. It’s also a great antidote to those who wail about the “nanny state” and “busybodies” – those who have benefited from the scheme tell a very different story

You see, raising awareness of risk is NOT the same as telling people what to do in their own homes. If you’re a new parent, or are not around small children very often, it’s unlikely that you’ll know about the hazards toddlers face in the home.

Getting down on your hands and knees and looking at the world from their point of view paints a very different picture – and reveals a multitude of hazards that were not apparent before.

For instance, before I started working at RoSPA, I had no idea that blind cords could pose any risk to children (or my cats!) – and why would I, without being told? I’ll always make sure I tie cords away with a cleat in the future – which is all that is required if, like me, you like blinds that require cords.

Accident prevention is not about banning things left, right and centre and it’s not about stopping people from having fun; it’s about raising awareness of the risks and taking reasonable steps to mitigate them – as well as improving industry safety standards. Our blind cord safety campaign is a good illustration of the type of work we do.

Presenting people with good advice and information, and allowing them to make their own choices about how to protect their families, enables them to take responsibility for their own safety without having outside “experts” tell them what to do.

All accident prevention work should be based on sound data, to ensure that time, money and resources are not wasted on interventions that target the wrong people, or are simply unlikely to work.

The statistics mentioned earlier enabled us to target the Safe At Home scheme at those who needed it most. In order to qualify to receive equipment, families with children aged 0-5 must have been living in an area covered by a participating project, and must also have been in receipt of certain benefits.

The evidence shows that children from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to be injured or killed in accidents. And in fact, shockingly, children of parents who are long-term unemployed or who have never worked are 13 times more likely to die as a result of unintentional injury and 37 times more likely to die from exposure to smoke, fire or flames than children of parents in higher managerial or professional occupations.

By installing a few simple safety measures such as smoke alarms, stair gates and window restrictors, the quality of life for these families could be vastly improved at no cost to themselves, and little cost to society – compared with the vast amount of money accidents and injuries cost us all.

It is hoped that the Safe At Home project has enabled local communities to run their own sustainable projects now the national scheme has come to an end.

More details about the achievements of Safe At Home will be announced when the project’s evaluation report is published in the next few weeks.

In the end, accident prevention advice and information could save the life of one of your family members. If you talked to someone who had lost a child in a home accident, you would probably find they had a very different perspective from the “elf ‘n’ safety” myths whipped up by some sections of the media.

Prevention is always better than cure. This applies to accident prevention as much as anything else. Join the debate – and support our campaign today.

Vicky Fraser, RoSPA’s Press Officer/Web Editor

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. So said former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, at a time when healthy scepticism in the rhetorical use of numbers was all the rage – as well as stovepipe top hats and brightly striped pantaloons.

But much has changed since the late 19^th-century – and not just the fashion.

Nowadays, the robust analysis of data is essential if your argument is to get a toe-hold in the collective consciousness (competing as it must with the X-Factor, Pippa Middleton, and the off-field antics of celebrity footballers).

But seriously, in an age of scarce resources every organisation worth their salt must now be providing a sophisticated response to the riddle, “where do we target resources?”

Here, at RoSPA, the answer to that question is staring us full in the face.

Accidents are responsible for 14,000 deaths and millions of injuries across the UK each year, costing the country an estimated £150billion. Yet, prevention is fairly easy to implement and inexpensive to deliver.

That’s why it is one of our key campaigns to make accident prevention a public health priority.

In a nutshell, here’s what we know about this “hidden epidemic”:

• Accidents are the principal cause of death up to the age of 39 in the UK

• Accidental injury continues to be the main cause of death for children after infancy
• In 2009, one death in 40 in England and Wales was caused by an accident. Roughly three times as many people suffer a serious, life-changing injury as are killed
• Among the causes of accidental death that have been increasing in recent years are falls, and accidental choking, strangulation and suffocation, particularly among older people
• Accidents are financially costly to Government and society
• Accident prevention is, compared to other potential public health interventions, easy to implement and inexpensive to deliver
• The return on accident prevention investment, measured in Quality Adjusted Life Years, outstrips every other potential public health intervention.

• Accidents diminish the lives of nearly a third of people in England

Following a lot of hard work in recent decades, big strides have been made in bringing down the number of people accidentally killed or injured on the road and at work. Yet, despite these significant gains, mortality statistics show that the overall trend for accidental death in the UK has been generally upwards in the last few years.

Accidents do not just cause immediate pain and suffering to the victim. Grief can last a lifetime and divorce and family breakdown are recognised as potential consequences of serious accidents. Families can suffer extreme financial hardship and the stress and strain of caring for an injured loved one should not be underestimated.

Despite RoSPA’s consistent lobbying – along with the work of many other organisations – accident prevention has remained a worryingly low priority for successive governments and has still not received the level of attention it deserves.

Several times in the last two decades, accidents have been listed as a priority by the Department of Health. But when there is a change of minister, the impetus often slows and suddenly the topic is dropped. Without government leadership and vocal support, others will not keep up the momentum.

In November 2010, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley announced the Coalition Government’s plans for public health in England, including the establishment of a new integrated service, called Public Health England.

RoSPA welcomed the opportunity to respond to the White Paper, Healthy Lives, Healthy People: our strategy for public health in England, and two associated consultations. However, the White Paper’s lack of recognition of the accidental injury problem, including its distribution, severities, costs or preventability, was of great concern. The focus instead was on other issues, such as alcohol-related ill health, diet, exercise and mental health.

In responding to the consultation, RoSPA put together the most comprehensive policy paper about accident prevention as a public health issue in its 94-year history. You can read RoSPA’s full consultation response (PDF 343kb) here.

RoSPA urges the Government and other leaders in the public health field to reflect on the many arguments which, taken together, constitute an unassailable case for developing fresh action on accident and injury prevention. Only by making such action a permanently-embedded feature of public health policy and practice in the UK will we be able to get on with our mission: which is to save lives and reduce injuries.

If you are as concerned as we are by this lack of action, please visit our public health campaign webpage and click on the big red “Support Our Campaign” button.

Your support – and the support of your friends and colleagues – would be much appreciated.

Michael Corley

RoSPA’s Campaigns Manager