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Ucatt says that the HSE’s sole role should be to promote workplace safety and protect workers from injury.
Ms Hackitt wrote in the HSE’s Delivery Plan for 2011/12: “Our role is to enable innovation that brings economic growth while ensuring that risks are managed properly and proportionately.”
Previous HSE documents have stated that the organisation’s role was: “To secure the health and safety and welfare of people at work and protect others from risks to health and safety from work activity.”
Ms Hackitt defended the HSE’s change of emphasis by saying: “Change is never easy, but standing still is not an option.”
Ucatt acting general secretary George Guy said: “Judith Hackitt needs to take a reality check if she believes that this is what the HSE should be doing. The HSE’s role is simple, it protects workers from being killed and injured. It is not the HSE’s role to be promoting economic growth. The government has an entire department to undertake that task.”
Just days after the HSE published its delivery plan, the first construction fatality of the reporting year (2011/12) occurred on 7 April in Whitstable, Kent, when a 24-year-old man was killed following a trench collapse on a housing development. A 36-year-old man was arrested and has been bailed on suspicion of corporate manslaughter.
The publication of the HSE’s new delivery plan comes after it has been told that its budget will be cut by at least 35% by 2015. The number of unannounced inspections it will be able to perform has been slashed with many sectors no longer receiving inspections in future.
Mr Guy added: “The HSE has been under sustained political attack by the Government and the cuts and policy changes forced on it will make all workplaces, especially industries with high accident rates such as construction, more dangerous. If the HSE moves away from its core functions it will make an already bad situation worse.”
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