Brian Nimick - British Safety Council

ePolitix.com speaks to the BSC's chief executive Brian Nimick about its work and in particular, the shocking results of its survey on safety.

Question: Can you tell me about the work of the British Safety Council?

Brian Nimick: The British Safety Council is a registered charity whose aim is to help create a healthier, safer and more sustainable society.

Question: I am aware that you have recently carried out a survey, can you tell me about this survey and what you have gained from the results?

Brian Nimick: Our survey was called 'Safe and Sound?' and we looked at 250 firms throughout the UK, from bluechip companies down to SMEs, and we also interviewed a thousand workers within those firms.

The aim was to look at the perceptions of health and safety within the organisations and among the workforce. What is of concern is that we found 62 per cent of workers, two-out-of-three, received little or no health and safety training from employers.

The Office of National Statistics says that there are 30 million people at work today, which means that up to 20 million people could be at an increased level of risk.

We were shocked to find that nearly 50 per cent of employers did not appear to offer any form of health and safety training despite the fact that they could be saving billions of pounds in payouts and costs. British businesses are losing £250 per second in costs and payouts for needless accidents in the workplace, which is about £7.8bn a year lost to business.

What is of real concern is that this survey follows on from the statistics last year from the Health and Safety Executive, which show that 241 people were killed in the workplace. This is the highest recorded overall figure since 2001 and equates to one death at work every working day. We believe that six billion working days have been lost to workplace injury every year. With 274,00 people injured last year, that equates to one worker being injured almost every minute of the working week .

The overall cost to the economy and society as a whole according to HSE figures is about £31.8bn a year. In other words, it is costing the nation a thousand pounds every second. It is obviously, as far as workers are concerned, a figure that is not sustainable.

It would appear that workers in the construction industry and small and medium-sized companies are the most at risk.

Question: And what would you say are the key messages that come from these results?

Brian Nimick: There are a number of key messages; I think that caring for the health and safety of employees is actually good business. The fact that businesses are losing £7.8bn a year shows that £7.8bn could be put back into the economy. The fact that it costs society as a whole £31.8bn shows again that it is not only good business but it is good social responsibility. That kind of money could build around 10 brand new hospitals.

Some research last year suggested that for every pound that was invested in health and safety provision, the business got a benefit equating to £3.73 so the rate of return is high. There are very few investments at the moment anywhere in the economy where you will get that sort of rate of return.

I think a number of things lie behind this; small and medium-size enterprises in particular feel overwhelmed by regulation and red tape, and health and safety is just another one of the burdens they see themselves as having to bear. It is hard with so much red tape to stand back and see that looking after the health and safety of employees will actually benefit the bottom line.

In addition to this there have been a number of 'silly safety' stories in the press. There are certain parts of the media that seem to want to jump onto any issue and say that health and safety lies at the root of it. For example, you have heard the stories of cancelled pancake races, of not being allowed to roll cheese down a hill, of not being allowed to throw sweets at children at a pantomime.

When you actually look closely at all of these, it has nothing at all to do with health and safety, it is all about insurance, policing, and other issues but it is not about health and safety. The problem is that constant silly safety stories actually devalue the main message of health and safety.

The bottom line here is that last year 241 people went to work, but they did not come home.

Question: How important is promoting environmental good practice, in the work that you do?

Brian Nimick: It is very important as well, it has direct impact on the health of employees, the health of people in the area where the business is and also the health of society as a whole. Just as important is that it makes good business sense.

We carry out a five-star health and safety audit, and we guarantee that if companies don't recover the cost of the audit back, they get it for free. It makes extremely good business sense to look closely at issues concerned with reducing your environmental impact.

One exercise we try out as part of our audit involves companies that have skips outside. We will ask them how much the skip is worth and they tend to give a quote of around £180 or however much it costs to hire a skip for the day. However, when we have a root around it can be quite surprising. We found one skip that was actually worth £27,000 to the company concerned. That was the value of the stuff that was in it.

Question: Do you find that within all of these, that small businesses struggle more with complying with safety standards and if so, why is that?

Brian Nimick: They have fewer resources, they cannot do what big companies do, they do feel under pressure and it is harder for them to perhaps identify what really needs to be done and they need help to identify what the real benefits are of taking a proactive approach to health and safety issues.

As part of our charitable function, we have developed an online five-minute health and safety check up for small and medium-sized enterprises and in five minutes they would have discovered the areas they need to concentrate on. This was designed for small and medium-sized enterprises to help them cut through the plethora of red tape and regulation and concentrate on what is really important.

Question: What is the real purpose of the training you have been carrying out in schools, do you think it will make a difference and how successful has the training been?

Brian Nimick: In the last 10 years, 66 young people have been killed at work. On  average, one young person, someone under the age of 25, is injured every 40 minutes in this country.

They are particularly vulnerable because many of them will come straight out of school, which is a protected environment, into the hurly burly world of business and industry and they perhaps have not developed the skills necessary to help them recognise where the risks are and what they need to do to ensure their safety and the safety of the people they are working with.

As part of the co-operative scheme between the British Safety Council, the Health and Safety Executive and the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health, we have developed a package to help train young people in schools. We now have 70,000 young people registered who are doing our entry level qualification this year and we are funding that entirely. 

It has been very successful in schools, there is demand for it, it is accredited training, it is on the national qualifications framework and the feedback we have had from teachers has been enormously positive and the feedback we've had from parents has been enormously positive. Most importantly, we have young people asking if they can do more, they want to go on to the next level.

We hope in the next academic year to have up to 100,000 on the training programme. The aim is eventually to have every single child in education receiving a form of basic training in risk awareness and their roles and responsibilities and the roles and responsibilities of employers before they leave school, and the British Safety Council is funding that in its entirety and we will continue to do that for the foreseeable future.

Question: I am aware that your work is not just in the UK, how do you operate internationally?

Brian Nimick: Still on the charitable side and also on the international side, we are working with a series of charities, such as CRISIS, to help provide training and qualifications that will help people get back into the workplace and we are funding 20,000 level one entry examinations every year aimed at disadvantaged and unemployed people.

Again, this work has just kicked off, I have just been to the first certificate presentation ceremony at the CRISIS training centre in East London and the feedback we are getting is very positive. We have many people who have been unemployed or disadvantaged and saying can we go and do some more. It's very much a case of reaching out and providing people with the skills that they need to get back into the workplace.

In terms of overseas, we work in 50 countries. We work with UK-based companies who operate internationally but we also work with internationally-based companies. We feel that we have a real role to export best practice in health and safety and the environment to countries where traditionally there has not been a history of health and safety legislation or the protection of the workforce.

We have developed very positive contacts in a number of countries and a number of companies are working in partnership with the British Safety Council with the common purpose of wishing to save lives.

It is important for us to promote best practice health and safety standards all the way down through the supply chain.

We are getting very positive response and real recognition from a lot of internationally-based organisations about developing their corporate social responsibility, and we are helping by working with them to ensure that the same level of protection is provided all the way to the bottom end of the supply chain to the home company.

Question: What would you say that your key messages are for parliamentarians - the key readership of epolitix.com?

Brian Nimick: The key message for parliamentarians to rise above the silly stories about health and safety and recognise that health and safety is important.  With 241 deaths at work and 237,000 injuries at work last year, we need to work together and concentrate on creating a healthier, safer and more sustainable environment.

It is not about wrapping people in cotton wool. The bottom line is that good health and safety is a vital component not only of the business economy but of the social economy of the United Kingdom as a whole.

Question: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Brian Nimick: We have donated £2m to the Olympic Delivery Authority to ensure that every single volunteer who works on the Olympics will have a basic level of health and safety training.

This works hand-in-hand with the other work we are doing with regard to disadvantaged and unemployed people. We are also starting to work quite closely now with education authorities in Africa, in the Gulf and in India, to help develop basic levels of training that will be passed on to children in the education environment as well. We see that as very much a part of our outreach activities.

We feel that by doing this, that when those people enter the workplace it will encourage them to engage with their employers in creating a healthy environment for them to work in.