Introduction
Most people would like to think that their job makes a useful contribution to society. Surely there are few things more worthwhile than ensuring that every worker goes home safely at the end of their shift, or that citizens are able to enjoy services, events or everyday activities without risking their lives unnecessarily? It comes as something of a shock, then, when members of the professions and organizations concerned with health and safety find themselves on the end of political and media criticism as lacking common sense and obstructing growth and competitiveness in UK industry. They may look back to a time when the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 (hereafter HSWA) was passed, apparently with the support of a broad public and policy consensus. Now they are the object of reviews, by a former industrialist and Conservative minister, Lord Young of Graffham (2010), and a Swedish academic working in London, Ragnar Löfstedt (2011a), intended to remove ‘red tape’ and reduce the ‘burden’ of regulation.
How did we get ‘here’ from ‘there’? What has happened over the last 50 years to undermine the view of the HSWA as a high-water mark of social progress? How has ‘elf ’n safety’ come to be treated with derision? What can the health and safety professions and organizations learn from that experience to help them develop appropriate policies in the future?
Background
The challenge faced by the health and safety profession is one known to social scientists as a problem of legitimacy. We can think of this as the respect that is given to some institution, like the health and safety profession, by other groups that it deals with. In more formal language, is there a ‘generalized perception or assumption’ that organizations or professions concerned with health and safety are ‘desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions’ (Suchman 1995: 574)? Judgements about this appropriateness or acceptability are usually made with reference to two types of criteria: those that are procedural (about whether due process and accountability are present), and those that are moral (about whether the outcomes pursued are right and just). Social scientists sometimes talk about this system as a social licence to operate (Gunningham et al. 2004). The idea of a licence goes beyond the narrow view that an institution should only be concerned with the search for profit through efficiency, as indifference to the wider social impact of an institution’s activities may actually undermine its economic goals. An institution that is not generally regarded as legitimate finds it harder to function. The lack of respect makes it more costly to secure resources, implement policies and persuade other institutions to cooperate in joint activities.
Our project, then, took ‘health and safety’ as a broad area of activity, ranging more widely than the activities of regulators like the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) or the formal legal frameworks (such as the HSWA) which govern the area. This meant examining developments such as the emergence of a safety profession and of new stakeholders around health and safety, the changing nature of the British workplace, general social and political trends and the emergence of new types of risk. We used a mixed-method approach to document the ways that health and safety has been understood since 1960. Three kinds of data were collected. First, in order to understand the policy judgements made at different times, we conducted 40 oral history interviews with key surviving stakeholders (regulators, safety professionals, policymakers, trade union officials and employer representatives) from the field of health and safety. These interviews were semi-structured: the interviewer prompted interviewees to talk about specific topics but encouraged them to shape the discussions according to their own recollections of their role in events. Second, we examined a wide range of historical, archival and documentary sources produced by state bodies, trades unions, employers’ organizations, workers, the media and non-governmental organizations such as the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH), the British Safety Council and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA). These records were initially sampled to find out what was available: particular areas were then selected for more detailed investigation. Third, colleagues at the University of Nottingham (Jain and Leka 2015) searched for available survey data on public attitudes to health and safety, which was mostly from the latter part of the period. These were complemented by a series of focus groups (n = 8) which we conducted with a representative sample of members of the public (n = 67) to discuss contemporary attitudes towards health and safety.
A detailed account of the development of the institutional framework around health and safety regulation in the UK can be found in the next chapter. Here we focus on the social, economic and cultural contexts within which health and safety regulation has been created and implemented. How have they shaped the social licence of the professions and organizations involved? We outline eight critical moments in the story of health and safety since 1960. Although there is not the space here to go into great detail about each, they will introduce 14 key themes which characterize the changing perceptions of legitimacy over this period. Any attempt by the health and safety professions to influence the way that others think about them will need to take account of all of these themes.
First, though, it is worth underlining the findings from the survey evidence and our own focus groups: throughout this period, as far as we can establish, public attitudes towards health and safety regulation have generally been strongly positive. These are issues that matter to ordinary people, particularly when there are serious consequences or risks involved. A moral argument for safety regulation is widely recognized (see also Almond and Colover 2012; Walls et al. 2004). The focus groups established that negative opinions about specific aspects of health and safety are laid over basic positive appreciation of the need for intervention. There is a ‘critical trust’ in regulators and ‘safety people’ (Walls et al. 2004): tendencies towards rigidity, risk aversion and officiousness were unpopular, although being serious, strict and officious also increased trust. The most negative aspects of public perceptions (dislike of commercial motives and the ‘compensation culture’, lack of respect for expertise) relate both to wider themes identified below, and to an increasing sense of disengagement from, or lack of involvement in, ‘health and safety’ (Jain and Leka 2015).
Eight critical moments in health and safety
‘Such a thing is inevitable’: the Flixborough explosion, 1974
One of the most dramatic instances of workplace dangers since 1960 was the Nypro chemical plant explosion at Flixborough in Lincolnshire in 1974. This caused widespread damage: 28 people died and 36 more were seriously injured. It was a highly visible demonstration of the ways in which workplace hazards might affect the public. Flixborough followed a series of cases during the 1960s and early 1970s that had prompted recognition of the public risks associated with industrial and commercial activities. These included the collapse of a mobile crane at Brent Cross in London in 1964 (killing seven and injuring 32) and the collapse of a spoil heap at Aberfan in South Wales in 1966 (killing 144, mostly schoolchildren). The Factory Inspectorate (one of the regulators merged into the HSE in 1974) was increasingly concerned about the scale and development of new processes (particularly chemical hazards). In his 1967 annual report, for example, the Chief Inspector of Factories noted ‘the increased scale of modern manufacture, the vastly larger plant used, the higher speeds of much machinery [and …] the storage and use of very large quantities’ of potentially hazardous materials in close proximity to residents (Crown 1967: xiii).
The ignition of a massive, unplanned, hydrocarbon release at Flixborough gave concrete expression to these fears. Although those killed and injured were all employees, there was extensive property damage within a three-mile radius. The ‘holocaust at Flixborough’ received widespread media coverage (Guardian 1974: 10). The event occurred while the HSWA was passing through Parliament (the Act received royal assent nine weeks after the explosion). Janet Asherson, formerly of HSE, recalled:
It was very much a public issue because we had that ghastly explosion […] that pushed forward the development of the Health and Safety Work Act in 1974. […]. There was a huge sea change in legislation. It was filling a big gap.1
The public and media reaction added weight to what would become Section 3 of the HSWA, imposing a duty on the HSE to ensure the safety of those beyond the workplace. This has become an increasingly significant part of the HSE’s role. Nevertheless, these means of managing the risks to workers and the public created by modern industrial processes had limitations. In a 1977 interview, the then plant safety manager for Flixborough concluded:
we as a whole must accept the view that chances are, that somewhere, sometime there will be a major industrial incident. […] such a thing is inevitable in the sort of times we are living with our needs for a technological society.2
The Flixborough explosion exemplifies the changing nature of risks and the way that pre-1974 regulation was failing to keep pace. It also demonstrates the lack of public engagement in debate about the acceptability of technological risks. No one had asked the villagers living around Flixborough whether the explosion risk was acceptable to them, and efforts to engage the wider public with issues of risk regulation were generally limited at this time.
‘No one knew it was dangerous’:3 asbestos and health, 1960–2015
In contrast to the sudden, massive and public nature of events like the Flixborough explosion, occupational health issues have rarely provoked significant public awareness. As the Chief Inspector of Factories observed in 1969, though:
it is now clear that in many areas […] for some groups of worker the risk of injury or death from industrial disease is much greater than that from accidents […] at least as much effort must be put into the control of toxic contaminants in the atmosphere as into the elimination of the physical causes of accidents.
(Crown c.1969: xiii–xiv)
The differential treatment of safety and health remained, however. There are many reasons for this disparity, including the scientific and legal difficulties in establishing causation, the individualized nature of ill health and the long latency period before many diseases manifest themselves. Occupational ill health rarely produces ‘newsworthy’ events, as the former Chief Inspector of Factories, David Eves, noted:
something like the train accident at Ladbroke Grove, national front page headlines, public enquiries, everybody understands it was a terrible thing […]. Something like asbestos, it’s a much slower kind of burn. We’ve known about problems with asbestos for 100 years, but the regulation of asbestos has been spasmodic.4
Rather than a single ‘moment’ which shone a spotlight on the issue, asbestos only garnered occasional public and political attention – notably around the Acre Mill factory in Hebden Bridge in the 1970s and early 1980s, including the TV documentary ‘Alice – a fight for life’ (1982). The state-appointed Advisory Committee on Asbestos (1976–79) attempted to ‘rais[e] the standard of public debate and the level of public understanding’ (Simpson 1977: 1). For health issues, like asbestos-related disease, there remain confounding factors that limit public debate. The science behind asbestosis, for instance, emerged slowly and was contested (particularly by industry lobby groups) through highly technical arguments. Both of these factors tend to be off-putting to the public.
The extent to which workers were, and are, aware of the health risks to which they are exposed is also highlighted by the case of asbestos. Testimony from people employed from the 1960s into the 1980s suggests that ‘no one knew it was dangerous’.5 Consequently, employees were unable either to protect themselves or to fight to reduce the danger. Nevertheless, there is also strong evidence that ‘danger money’ induced workers to trade health for wages (even if they were not fully aware of this bargain).6 Although it is now less common to buy off workers in this way, other sorts of negotiation around health and safety issues still occur. Moreover, asbestos-related ill health does not simply affect those who have worked with it. Families were exposed to asbestos fibres on work clothing; asbestos was used in a huge variety of places; and dust escaped from factories such as Acre Mill or was released in the process of asbestos removal. Dan Shears of the GMB union criticized a recent HSE campaign aimed at getting small building firms to work safely with asbestos on the basis that ‘what you’re seeing is a lot of people who do work for larger businesses, “don’t worry so much about this asbestos, just make sure you’ve got the right gloves and PPE” […]. That’s quite contradictory to what we would say’,7 namely, that there was no such thing as safe work with asbestos.
The asbestos case illustrates the uncertainties and difficulties in dealing with health issues, which may take a long time to appear, and in identifying risks that cross ‘the factory fence’. While it also identifies the important role played by trade unions, it shows the problems of dealing with health and safety in non-unionized or weakly unionized sectors as well.
‘A hazard continually kept in the public eye’: nuclear power and the public, 1956–2015
Civilian nuclear power has been one area of visible public debate about health and safety risks. As with asbestos, these risks diffuse well beyond the workforce. However, they have been viewed as particularly insidious threats to both safety and health because of their intangibility. Nuclear power generation started in the UK in 1956. It continues to the present day, with nine operational sites and ten retired. Although health and safety concerns have been evident throughout the UK’s nucl...
