Home
|
All materials published and promoted by L Smith, PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU
|
|
Get your MP to speak out over workplace safety |
Respect MP George Galloway has tabled an Early Day Motion highlighting the scandalous collapse in the enforcement of Health and Safety laws by the HSE watchdog. New research shows you are more likely to be killed at work than through an act of violence. "But we see no hue and cry from politicians about that," says Galloway. "In fact, the government is sitting on recommendations which would begin to address the appalling collapse of health and safety prosecutions.
"It's not HSE inspectors to blame. They are hard pressed and their organisation has been cut to ribbons thanks to New Labour's mania for deregulation.
"With the Olympics and Crossrail projects turning much of east London into a giant construction site, it is more vital than ever that the HSE is properly resourced and allowed to enforce regulations, rather than relying on corporations essentially policing themselves with a little bit of advice being the only state intervention.
"Please contact your MP and ask them to support this Early Day Motion. And support health and safety inspectors and their union when they act to protect us all.
"It's a Tory stereotype that health and safety laws are just so much red-tape and lead to 'banning conkers' (a story that turned out, predictably, to be a complete lie). Health and safety at work is about people such as Simon Jones, a student who was killed on Shoreham dock on his first day at work. It's about the two firefighters who were killed in my constituency in 2004. It's about the four rail track workers killed at Tebay in 2004, or the disaster at Hatfield.
"Workers have a right to expect that when they go to work in the morning, they'll be heading home in one piece in the evening."
Full text of George Galloway's Early Day Motion to Parliament
That this House notes the findings of the recent Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Briefing which showed that there is a much higher chance of being killed by working than by inter-personal violence, and that there is a crisis in Health and Safety Executive (HSE) enforcement indicated by a 49 per cent. fall in prosecutions by HSE over a five year period; and calls on the Government to introduce the following interim measures to implement in full and immediately the recommendations of the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee in its 2004 report, The Work of the Health and Safety Commission and its Executive, HC 456, to amend the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations to provide new rights for workplace safety representatives to stop the job where a hazard or risk of injury is identified, to introduce positive legal duties on directors to ensure the safety of workers and members of the public, and to require the HSE to develop proposals for publicising sentences of convicted companies. |
|
