Fallen between the cracks in the pavement

You can’t open a newspaper, power up your iThingy or switch on the television news without being bombarded by facts and figures. The size of Greece’s structural deficit, percentage falls on the FTSE. Whatever the story, the media can usually sum it up in a number.

So why then, given the media’s insatiable love affair with numbers, did yesterday’s figures showing a rise in workplace deaths barely get a mention? Bad news and those pesky little magic numbers sell newspapers, right? Maybe, but maybe more to the point: stories on health and safety got in the way.



Only recently had the Church of England got its collective dog collar in a twist over ‘health and safety fears’. Resignations ensued, St Paul’s closed and then opened again. Guy ropes were of the Devil’s making and everyone paused for thought to consider what Jesus would make of it all. Radio 4’s PM programme reported that the protesters had brought their own health and safety expert into camp and assessed that there was no health and safety failings at all. This was at odds with the Church’s own health and safety guidance.

Of course, the story is more nuanced than that however the media loved the health and safety angle, but curiously went quiet about it once the ‘health and safety fears’ were highlighted as code for “please don’t sue us...”
This week, everyone’s favourite fiction-peddler, Richard Littlejohn, berated health and safety because (YOU couldn’t make this up, but he did) he claimed it prevented office workers sharing a tin of biscuits because it might contravene health and safety regulations.

Spurious, if not downright inaccurate, reporting on health and safety continued forth, spewing from Littlejohn’s column only to infect his own paper’s news pages. Last week, the Daily Mail bemoaned the decision by Royal Mail to suspend deliveries to a set of residents in Essex because of unsafe roads. Unsafe private roads. Private roads that are the responsibility of the residents to maintain. Readers of that particular fine piece of reporting will only get to the facts of the story in the final few paragraphs.

So, you see? The rise in the number of people killed at work barely makes an editorial ripple because the human tragedy of those deaths are at odds with the ‘pantomime’ agenda certain sections of Fleet Street has when it comes to health and safety. And that’s why yesterday’s figures from the HSE have fallen between the cracks in the pavement.

IOSH has voiced its concerns over the figures. And quite right too. The unions haven’t said anything about the rise (too busy goading the government over public sector pension strikes), politicians haven’t commented on the figures (too busy goading the unions) and the HSE has expressed its determination to work with businesses to keep workplace deaths to a minimum.

Let’s hope that when the government’s report into health and safety comes out this month, it paints a picture of what real health and safety can do to help the country. And not a report that’s a ‘paint by numbers’ exercise that plays to the ‘red top’ populous. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Shaun.