TUC Launches Statistics Advice For USRs
Under the banner heading of ‘Statistics - How to find them and use them. Guidance for health and safety representatives’, the TUC launched a new resource for Union Safety Reps on 14th July.
The site provides major website links to health and safety statistics, and explains why such statistics are important for USRs to be aware of and how to utilise them:
“Statistics are an important tool for any health and safety representative. They can tell us a lot about what is happening in an industry or area and give us the information that we need about injuries or illnesses that we need for prevention.
Statistics do not need to be complicated. They are just numbers, and a health and safety representative does not need to know about any of the complex ways that numbers are collected and analysed to be able to use them.
Statistics will be able to tell you how many people are injured in your workplace every year, or how many people are off sick and for how long. This will allow you spot problem areas and make proposals for how they can be reduced. You can also compare figures with previous years to see if there are any trends on new problems arising.”
The website then provides information and links were stats can be obtained and on how to use them.
This is a very valuable resource for all USRs. However, it does not include a caveat that HSE figures for example rely on reporting of incidents by the employer, and as such is a gross understatement of actually injuries, sick absence, and deaths.
Hazards campaign have always advised this and argued that the HSE stats are not a true reflection of what is happening in the country.
Their arguments and assessment of the true scale of death and injury to workers in the UK is based on the work of two Liverpool based researchers Professor Steve Tombs, who with Dr David Whyte, produced a blistering report on the true state of the HSE and workplace deaths and injuries in the uk.
In their booklet, they say:
"HSE injury stats don’t add up - official
Health and Safety Executive (HSE) figures on the number of people killed at work in Britain fell last year to a record low. The HSE provisional data released on 30 June 2010, which exclude work-related road, marine, air accident deaths, work-related deaths of members of the public and the entire occupational disease death toll, show that 151 workers were killed between 1 April 2009 and 31 March 2010 compared to 178 deaths in the previous year and an average number over the last five years of 220 deaths annually.
The holes in HSE’s occupational injury and disease statistics came in for strong criticism in a May 2010 UK Statistics Authority report. The Authority checked HSE’s figures against a code of practice for official statistics and indicated they do not make the grade, concluding “HSE does not produce an overall figure for work-related fatalities in Great Britain.” It recommended HSE “investigate the feasibility of producing statistics on the total number of work-related injuries and fatalities.”
You can access their full report via the Hazards website here
Access the TUC’s statistics guide to USRs here
Source: Hazards / TUC
