Why am I sometimes reluctant to say I work in Health and Safety?

You know the feeling, you’re at a gathering and the conversation turns to lines of work. I mumble “I’m in the H&S industry” and wait for the eyes to roll or just glaze over. Occasionally you get a quip about “you lot” banning conkers, flapjacks with sharp corners or having any fun at all in schools. I can’t blame them and would have been guilty of it myself. However, most “Health and Safety Gone Mad” tabloid fodder is seldom founded in real H&S issues but is often used as an umbrella excuse for overly officious working policies in a society increasingly fearful of litigation. The Health and Safety Executive have even set up a Myth Busters Challenge to set the record straight.

We’re fortunate we live in a time and a place where H&S can be taken for granted or even ridiculed but its founding principles were developed to protect the routine abuse of workers and their personal safety. If you think I’m talking about a Dickensian age when there was “trouble at mill” you’d be wrong. In 2016 we remembered Aberfan, the terrible tragedy that shocked the country and galvanized the political will to transform the UK’s approach to workplace health and safety. On 21st October 1966, a mountain of slurry and coal waste engulfed Pantglas junior school in Aberfan, claiming the lives of 116 children and 28 adults. The investigating tribunal left no room for doubt about what had caused the disaster and where the blame lay: “The Aberfan Disaster is a terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude by many men charged with tasks for which they were totally unfitted, of failure to heed clear warnings, and of total lack of direction from above”.

This report was an important catalyst for the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. Fifty years on, the Act remains the cornerstone of modern Health and Safety practice, since its introduction recorded workplace fatalities have dropped from over 2000 to under 500 a year. There’s been a lot of change over the last fifty years but the grief and anger when 2000, 500 or even one life is taken or crushed because profit came before safety never changes. 

I’m Lisa Robinson and I work in Health and Safety. You’re welcome.