Health & safety: the rhetoric and reality of compassionate Conservatism
‘The second situation in which official action on health and safety is appropriate is where there is an imbalance of power. This imbalance of power is found, most typically, in the relationship between an employer and employee.
Of course, trade unions remain a bulwark against most abuse happening. But it remains the case that losing employment is a huge financial and emotional blow. So employees may feel pressured to do work they have not been properly trained for, or for which they do not have the correct equipment or supervision.
That’s why it is right to place reasonable rules on employers so they maintain a duty of care for those that work for them.’
The level-headed words of a trade union organizer?
No, in fact these are the words of David Cameron in his speech on ‘health and safety culture’ today, billed by the Tories’ new favourite paper as Cameron’s ‘war on the health and safety brigade’.
So what’s going on? Well, I think there are two main things happening.
First, Cameron and his team know that this is not the bit of the speech that is going to get picked up by the media, and are happy to insert it into what Hopi has rightly identified as cheap populism, where:
‘All you have to do is pick whatever particular bugbear is being demonised in the press, say it appears to have “gone too far”, quote a few examples clipped from years old newspapers, then give yourself a get out clause where you admit that “there are some benefits” but conclude that you will sheer away the bad and leave the good, while not being particularly clear about how you will do that.’
The way the speech is lapped up, not just by the Sun, but by the Telegraph (Cameron ‘promising a health and safety clear out’) is evidence enough that it’s worked, with the focus kept firmly on school children being asked to wear goggles to play conkers, and a few other well-known examples brought forward to strengthen the insinuation that all health and safety is loonie left bunk.
But second, there is the related but more insidious process whereby the Conservatives prepare the policy ground, not simply to ‘leave the good’ - the very real achievements of health and safety legislation that have been achieved - but to start to strip these away too.
By ensuring that what he acknowledges to be the benefits of day-to-day (workplace) health and safety legislation and systems are conflated with what are qualitatively different issues around public risk assessment and the wider issue of creeping litigation culture, Cameron reaches the point at the end of his speech where he is able to justify the a full-scale review (by Lord Young) of all health and safety legislation, whatever it covers and however useful it is:
’I know the over-the-top health and safety culture that has grown in our country in recent years provokes a lot of understandable anger.
But anger itself is not solution.
Instead we need a forensic examination of what has gone wrong and the steps we need to take to put it right.
We know what has gone wrong.’
Why, we might ask ourselves logically, bother with a forensic examination of what is wrong if we already ‘know what is wrong’.
This illogic reveals the real agenda. While a review might, if properly undertaken, reveal that not enough is being done to protect workers, and that too many are still being injured and made ill unnecessarily, that is simply not in Lord Young’s brief; his task is to reduce employer responsibilities for health and safety, whatever the rhetoric about its importance.
No wonder Alexander Ehmann, head of parliamentary and regulatory affairs for the Institute of Directors, is keen on the idea:
‘Health and safety is an important area in which high level, yet proportionate protections are absolutely essential in protecting employees and employers alike…… Reviewing existing regulations will be a useful start, but for real impact we urge the Conservatives to rule out any possibility of new red tape on health and safety for some time.’
Quite correctly, he knows that what this is really about is ensuring that what is ‘proportionate’ is pushed back in favour of the employer (actually quite the opposite of what Cameron actually says workplace health and safety should be about in his speech), and he knows that he’s in a position to push for commitments from the Conservatives even before a review, because he understands where the review is really headed.
What will this mean in practice? Well, I don’t know where the axe will fall, and we’ll see if the Tories come into power. But, just as one possible example, we might find Lord Young keen to examine whether employers really should ‘have a duty, under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, to assess and manage the risk of stress-related ill-health arising from work activities, and under the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974, to take measures to control that risk.’
That, he might argue, is beyond what can ‘reasonably’ (see use Cameron’s phrasing again) be expected of an employer whose main role is to make profits.
Such a relaxation may not seem dramatic in itself – it’s not as visible or dramatic as removing the requirement that builders wear hard hats, for example – but it’s the kind of subtle change that over years will lead to the kind ‘huge financial and emotional blows’ for working people, which Cameron, the compassionate Conservative, would now have us believe he is so concerned about.
It will be interesting to see where Cameron goes with this. One of the key problems, so far as I can see, is the enormous mess which constitutes the common law in this area.
Even if Cameron were to remove the Act you mentioned then employer’s still have a common law duty to prevent “foreseeable” harm “caused” by their actions. Both these concepts are somewhat nebulous, or at least extremely complicated, even to the lawyer. So workers wouldn’t be left without protection and employers without responsibilities, but they would be rather less defined than they are now – which isn’t really good for anyone. I doubt they would dare to go so far as widespread revision of the common law to reduce duties – you would sound slightly mad arguing that employers don’t have a duty of reasonable care to their employees.
I hope Cameron’s speech isn’t as disingenuous as you purport, though of course it very well could be. Part of the problem I experience as a natural Conservative is assessing Cameron’s true intentions. We as yet don’t know the answer as to whether judging him by the standards of the last Tory governments is fair, or whether he constitutes, in some ways, a signficant progression from the ideological horrors of Thatcherism.
Barney @1: Useful thought thanks. While for headline purposes it’s convenient to identify Cameron personally as the architect of all this, of course I realise that he’s only really the messenger. I have no personal antipathy towards him, and suspect some of the ‘compassionate’ bit of his Conservatism is genuinely enough felt.
My concern is that by unleashing this review he is unwittingly legitimising the development of anti-worker institutions and that a string of developments will occur over which he or his successors has little control. In respect specifically of any attack on the HSE, I would consider this an attack on an institution which I (as a natural leftie to youtr natural conservative) would define as one of the key post-war concessions of captalism to labour; it is genuinely an organisation, peopled as it is by people who’ve actually worked in industry/public serves etc., which defends the interests of workers. This is partly why it is so reviled.
(I should add my own declaration of interest here. I am one of the thousands of nurses unable to work in their chosen trade because of occupational injury, and one of thousands who might have been spare quite a lot of physical pain if employer responsbilities for lifting had been in place in the 1980s). I am of course fortunate enough to be able to earn my living a different way now).
Yes, you are right about the back up of common law, but I think having to rely on that (and the instiutionally biased legal minefield that goes with it) is short changing workers.
And yes, I hope I’m overreacting too, but the sense I get from the speech, and the way it is structured, is that the use of the argument (justified in may ways) about the broader issues of societal risk aversion and litigation culture is a real Trojan horse for the introduction of materially regressive measures in the really important bits of H&S.
Bizzarely I actually kind of agree with you about the HSE – though I obviously wouldn’t conceptualise it in the terms you do.
Further I agree that getting rid of the statutory basis for liability would short-change workers – though I would stress the uncertainty of it rather than the institutional bias. I’ve haven’t seen too much evidence of such bias in recent appellate decisions – though it is off the point you are making I submit that the bias is probably more perceived than actual. But I can’t pretend I know much about industrial accident law so I could well be wrong.
On your main point I think we shall just have to wait and see. His comments would certainly serve as a legitimising veil for undermining H&S, but I think the public are so anti-H&S in its more ridiculous forms that it probably doesn’t need much legitimation – a point I think is within your analysis of the populist element of the speech.
As a coda, I’d be fairly surprised if much of the legislation isn’t in response to EC directives, so any curtailment may be necessarily fairly limited.
A Lord tilts at windmills while (the City) of Rome burns…this speech and review is the kind of silly demagoguery that the Tories in perticular feel obliged to continue as it supports their power base among a large section of Mail and Telegraph readers.
I doubt if there is the sinister motive of going as far as reducing real health and safety protection. There may be an element of playing to their harder-nosed patrons in business, but to undermine vital safety regulations would risk scandal.
Rather, besides being part of direct maintence of their electoral base, speeches like this are (I think) designed to foster a mindset, to steer the audience away from a social-demnocratic tendency to expect problems to be solveable towards a US-Republican style suspicion of government solutions and an illusion of control over politics created by hearing their press-implanted gripes echoed from on high.
This approach is starting to look archaic, as there has been such a rapprochement between left and right in recent years that New Labour and the Coalition are both really social democrats. The consumer is now demanding a political product that works and has never bneen better informed when it doesn’t.
The present crisis dictates cuts, but otherwise Cameron’s speeches and hands-on approach are quite similar to Tony Blair’s.