Health and safety has always been a field of policy and practice that has engaged with, and been embedded within, broader social and political contexts. But it has been noticeable that, in the years since the 2010 United Kingdom general election, health and safety events and publications have increasingly focused their attention onto questions such as ‘what has gone wrong with health and safety?’, or ‘does health and safety have an image problem?’ The public and social legitimacy of ‘health and safety’, as an area of practice, has become an issue of concern not just for those who work in the area, but also for others who have a stake in the issue. Everyone in Britain is a stakeholder in health and safety, in myriad—though often invisible—ways, from a working environment which doesn’t kill, injure or make people ill, to public spaces which it is possible to use without coming to harm. However, these absences of ill effect go largely unnoticed. Instead, attention is focused either on moments where the normality of safe and healthy life is disrupted, or on the alleged ‘nuisances’ of a system claimed to be over-protective.

As a result, one of the most visible stakeholders in health and safety, the Government itself, has found it imperative to be seen to be taking action. In particular, over the past decade it has commissioned two reviews of the health and safety system which have addressed the issue of public perception in this area. The Young Review (2010) argued that:

since the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 was passed we have built up an enviable record: today we have the lowest number of non-fatal accidents and the second lowest number of fatal accidents at work in Europe […y]et at the same time the standing of health and safety in the eyes of the public has never been lower. (2010: 25)

So, even falling rates of recorded accident and injury (HSE 2012, 2013) do not translate into improved attitudes towards the system. The subsequent Löfstedt Review (2011) argued that hostile media coverage may be negatively influencing duty-holders’ compliance behaviour, and recommended that steps be taken to improve public engagement with, and understanding of, risk regulation (2011: 39, 41, 92).

Both reviews reflected a more widespread recognition that a popular climate of antipathy towards health and safety regulation had taken hold in Britain. This was expressed via the Government’s ‘Red Tape Challenge ’ consultation exercise of 2011–2013,¹ which crystallised public expressions of dissatisfaction within a putative policy-making process, and via the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE, the UK’s national health and safety regulator) ‘Sensible Risk Management ’ policy (HSE 2006) and ‘Myth Busters Challenge Panel ’,² both of which sought to engage with negative attitudes towards health and safety. Perhaps three main strands to this poor profile can be discerned. First, politicians have become increasingly vocal in attacking health and safety regulation during this time, with Ministers expressing their “determin[ation] to stamp out the health and safety killjoys”.³ This has arguably brought health and safety more prominently into the public sphere, and also tied it to broader arguments about the desirability of state intervention in the economy and society more generally. Second, and related, has been the emergence of a vocal anti-regulatory business lobby which has called for the removal of health and safety ‘burdens’, for instance via a Government ‘Business Taskforce’, which categorised the EU’s Health and Safety at Work Framework Directive as a “barrier to starting a company and employing people” (Business Taskforce 2013: 22). And third, media coverage of health and safety has become increasingly hostile, with press outlets seen as “compet[ing] to write about absurdity after absurdity, all in the name of ‘elf and safety’’ (Young 2010: 25), resulting in a “constant stream of stories in the press blaming health and safety […] for preventing individuals from engaging in socially beneficial activity, overriding common sense and eroding personal responsibility” (Löfstedt 2011: 16). This media coverage has been both widespread and influential, and has tended to focus on explicitly challenging the legitimacy of health and safety as an idea by questioning both the moral justifiability, and procedural fairness, of regulation in this area (Almond 2009: 371–374).

As a result, it has appeared as if the public profile of health and safety has become poorer now than at any time in the recent past. All of the elements identified here have contributed to a shift in popular sentiment and a dynamic of populist dissent and distrust towards health and safety that in some ways foreshadowed and mirrored the dynamics of the 2016 Brexit referendum (Smismans 2017). Like Brexit and its antecedents, this negative contemporary climate raises a series of important questions, which this book seeks to address. First, there is a need to consider whether a fundamental shift has taken place in the state of affairs surrounding health and safety in the United Kingdom, an area of activity whose origins are intimately bound up with the history of industrial relations and the modern welfare state. Health and safety was born of the moralistic, protectionist, and paternalistic reform movements of the nineteenth century, which sought to address the social costs of the industrial revolution (Bartrip and Fenn 1983; Carson 1979; Long 2011; MacDonagh 1958; Mills 2010; Thomas 1948; Ward 1962); it was also tied into the “wave of humane feeling and high aspiration for the future” (Mess 1926: 33) that followed World War I, and which gave rise to the nascent welfare state. Later developments have reflected the increasing importance attached to welfare-oriented social citizenship rights in the second half of the twentieth century, and the drive towards equality, widened participation, and extended state provision that this brought (Almond 2013: Ch. 4; Tucker 1995). According to this narrative, improving health and safety standards and provision has become more established and embedded as a desirable goal for modern societies to pursue via regulation and control. This broad consensus was seen to have culminated in the Robens Report of 1972, which proposed reforms to modernise the regulatory system so as to reflect the “natural identity of interest” (Robens 1972: 21) between parties in the area of health and safety, and in the subsequent Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 , which embedded a consensual, corporatist regulatory framework into law.

As this book will show, while this framework has endured, relatively intact, to the present day, it is less clear that the social consensus around the issue, the political settlement that enacted it, and the society that it was designed for, remain the same. So while the critical policy and media climate of the last few years may appear to be a distinctive and self-contained phenomenon that constitutes a significant disjuncture with the past, there are also grounds for seeing it as reflective of a longer term shift, as a climate of neoliberal politics has become entrenched since the late 1970s (Harvey 2005; Tombs and Whyte 2010; Tucker 1995). This has arguably led to an ideological rejection of regulation and welfarism, and a reordering of regulatory systems to be less state-centred, and more focused on ‘New Public Management ’ values of efficiency, accountability , and reduced capacity (Hood 1991). Changes in the material organisation of society—the types of work and industry undertaken, the membership and influence of representative bodies like trade unions and professional safety organisations, and the diversification of the workforce and the risks they face—have also meant that the core continuities in the area of health and safety (in terms of actors, laws, and political processes) have had to evolve and change in response to broader contextual pressures in the economic, social, and political spheres. But we should also be cautious about assuming that the degree of opposition to the idea of health and safety is necessarily greater now than in the past. This has always been a contested area of policy, and the realities of these debates and assertions must also be tested and assessed. What change has really occurred in relation to how health and safety is thought about, understood, and evaluated, and in what direction has any change moved? What are the key drivers of change; do they lie at the institutional and political levels, or in the social and cultural context against which systems of health and safety regulation operate?

This book aims to provide a focused ‘modern history of health and safety in Britain’, a set of historically grounded observations and assessments of contemporary tre...