Occupational Health and Safety
in Scotland: an opportunity to improve work environments
for all. Full report
News release
Friday 28 March 2014
Independence could deliver a healthier future for Scotland’s workers
Scotland’s poor health and safety record and productivity could be vastly improved if the nation was freed from the Westminster government’s damaging attack on the regulators that police workplace safety, a new report has concluded.
“Scotland’s workers are more likely to be killed than those south of the border, and deregulation-obsessed London lawmakers are doing all they can to make matters worse,” said University of Stirling Professor Andy Watterson, lead author of ‘Occupational Health and Safety in Scotland: an opportunity to improve work environments for all’.
The Stirling report concludes that an Independent Scotland could deliver quickly the practicable, proven and cost-effective measures necessary to reform Scottish occupational health and safety and reverse the erosion of workplace protection imposed by Westminster.
“Only an Independent Scotland would have the necessary control needed over health and safety laws, agencies, and related budgets and structures involving health, local authorities and environmental bodies to address the current problems,” Professor Watterson argues. “Successive Westminster governments have run down the health and safety agencies and cut budgets dramatically. Good models - far better than those in the UK and wholly feasible for and Independent Scotland - already exist on occupational health and safety and work environments in Nordic countries.”
Co-author Professor Rory O’Neill comments: “Undermining regulation and enforcement of workplace health and safety standards can guarantee just two things – more sick and injured workers and a less productive economy.
“Scotland needs a fresh, independent approach to deliver a high class, high productivity economy and that means supporting responsible employers with a well resourced and visible regulatory system, while keeping its workforce happy and healthy.
“The lessons from Nordic countries presenting in this report establish the most productive economies are also the best regulated. Norway, for example, has world-leading productivity levels, lower working hours and high occupational safety standards. You don’t have to grind down your workforce to be economically successful, a lesson to which the Westminster government appears constitutionally blind.”
The report’s key recommendations include:
- A Scottish Work Environment Act is needed to create a properly funded and staffed Scottish Occupational Health and Safety Agency (SOHSA), geared to prevention policies and practice, located within the Scottish Government health department with oversight from the Minister of Public Health, and accountable to a representative board of employers, employees, trade unions and citizen groups.
- Citizen groups are needed because workplace hazards such as open cast mining, mining, fracking and coal-bed methane extraction may also become community hazards. It was notable that the ICL/Stockline explosion occurred due to a highly hazardous industrial process being conducted within a residential working class community.
- A Labour inspectorate, within SOHSA, to well-resourced , along the Nordic model lines, that would advise, inform, inspect and regulate workplaces with regard to occupational health and safety, and employment conditions that impact on worker health, safety and welfare. The inspectorate would have legal rights of entry to all workplaces.
- SOHSA would apply the precautionary principle in policies, develop strategies and best practice: for example using the most internationally up to date prescribed occupational disease lists, toxics use reduction approaches, control of job-related stress and establishing whistleblower hotlines, support and protection.
Notes to editors
Occupational Health and Safety in Scotland: An opportunity to improve work environments for all, Andrew Watterson, Rory O’Neill, Tommy Gorman, Jim McCourt, Occupational and Environmental Health Research Group, University of Stirling, Scotland, March 2014. www.regulatingscotland.org
Further information: Professor Andrew Watterson. aew1@stir.ac.uk. Telephone : 01786-466283. Mobile: 07563-195904.
Background
- Bodies such as SOHSA, SEPA and the Health Protection Agency (Scotland) or their successors should be transparent and accountable to the communities they cover as there are currently major democratic deficits. Improved governance at national and regional level of all work environments and wider environments is needed with appropriate employer, worker and community input. All should be answerable to the Scottish Parliament.
- Effective robust regulation and enforcement is required as the Scottish mechanism for enforcing the relevant laws relating to work and wider environments and not diluted ‘better’, ‘smart’ , ‘soft’ or ‘responsive’ regimes that fail to make public health the first priority. Adoption of the Inquiries into Deaths (Scotland) Bill now before the Scottish Parliament would also be welcome.
- Inter-agency working enhanced to ensure effective policy and practice and the most effective use of resources. This would connect health, work and environment with social policies and ensure effective advice and information especially for SMEs and employers.
- Innovative methods of workplace and community participation could be developed to harness local skills and knowledge. These should include trade union safety reps with rights to enter workplaces to investigate health and safety claims and issue provisional improvement notices, trade union ‘roving safety reps’ and ‘employment rights’ representatives with a regional role, community environmental monitors linked with citizen science projects, initiated and run by communities and not simply acting as data collectors for government.
- The establishment of worker and community health and safety centres across Scotland to advise employees, unionised or not, about prevention and detection of disease and injury and support for victims. This could be created by re-aligning funds from health promotion initiatives that should be spent on preventing workplace safety and health hazards.