Details supplied by the TUC:
The government should consider the victims of lax workplace safety standards when it fashions its policy on safety regulation, campaigners and bereaved families have warned.
The groups, speaking ahead of Lord Young's report to the government on health and safety regulation, safety tragedies will only be prevented if strong regulation is backed up by strong enforcement. The conclusions of the Young report, expected to be published next week and commissioned by David Cameron, have been heavily trailed and are expected to include measures to reduce legal safety 'burdens' on business.
Hazards Campaign chair, Hilda Palmer, commented: 'No-one voted to die at work in the last election, but the coalition government policies so far, through the Lord Young review, other deregulatory policies, plus the planned cuts in public services, threaten the regulation and enforcement of workplace safety and health. They risk condemning more workers to death, injury and ill-health.'
Bereaved relatives campaign Families Against Corporate Killers (FACK) has sent a copy of its new DVD, 'Face the FACKs: the human cost of workplace killing', to Lord Young. FACK member Linzi Herbertson, whose husband Andy fell from an incorrectly assembled scaffold, said she hoped telephone assurances to FACK from Lord Young that his report would 'pleasantly surprise us' would be realised. 'If he fails to do this we will hold him to account and want to know why he can disregard the facts, the evidence and all the deaths caused by employers' negligence at work,' she said.
