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Safety inspections in the UK have plummeted to a new low, increasing the chances of workers being killed, made ill or injured by their jobs, according to new figures recently published by the TUC.
Previously unpublished figures obtained by the TUC-backed health and safety journal Hazards from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) show that in the three years from 2002/03, visits to firms by safety inspectors dropped by over a quarter, down from over 74,000 a year to barely 55,000 in 2004/05.
The Hazards report says that UK employers are now less likely to be inspected, less likely to be prosecuted, less likely to be convicted of safety crimes, and less likely to receive a notice from an HSE inspector demanding safety improvements.
The Hazards figures also show that employers who commit safety offences against their staff are unlikely to ever find themselves up in court. In 2003/04, HSE took legal action against 960 firms but in 2004/05 this figure had fallen to just 712 prosecutions. With more than 30,000 fatal or major injuries being reported to the HSE that year, in 2004/05 employers had a one in 40 chance of being prosecuted following major accidents in their workplace.
And over same two-year period, the number of employer convictions for safety crimes fell from 887 to 673, and the number of prohibition or safety improvement notices issued to companies or organisations by the HSE fell from 11,295 to 8,445. The Hazards report says that the shift away from more dangerous blue collar to safer white collar jobs is masking a serious official failure to make significant inroads into the numbers of deaths and serious injuries at work.
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