Downing Street Summit With Insurance Industry Excludes Grieving Families
As this weeks NHS Summit showed, the Government excludes from discussions all those not supporting their policies; and has no interest in the facts and realities around their policy issues.
Last week, 14th February, a summit was held to discuss the Government’s policy of taking action to tackle what they claim is a compensation culture in the UK, whilst reducing legal costs and cutting so-called health and safety red tape.
Those attending where from the insurance industry, and from consumer and business groups.
But no representatives from the Trade Unions or Health & Safety professional organisation such as RoSPA and IOSH, or from victims support groups such as Families Against Corporate Killers (FACK) were invited to attend.
The campaigning group Families Against Corporate Killers (FACK) expressed anger but not surprise that the Prime Minister continues to make policy about people’s lives, about health and safety at work, based on the benefits to business not the massive costs and burdens on families of people killed by negligence.
Whilst the rationale for the summit was said to be about discussing the rising premiums that many drivers, families, consumers and businesses are facing, it went far beyond that and resulted in the insurance industry hijacking health & safety policy making by individual businesses and replacing it with the principle of an insurance industry health & safety paradigm.
The report of the summit on the No 10 website of the Prime Minister gave details of the outcome of the summit, with two key objectives that the Government and insurance industry agreed to work together on:
- to tackle the issue identified by the Red Tape Challenge of health and safety ‘myths’, insurers will provide short guidance to all clients at the point of purchasing insurance setting out clearly what SMEs need to do, and critically what they don’t need to do, to comply with health and safety law and get insurance cover, to ensure that businesses are not asked to go beyond what is actually required by law;
- insurers committed to challenge more vexatious health and safety civil claims in order to tackle the compensation culture;
Interestingly the report also linked the health & safety review with the summit, despite their being nobody from health & safety organisations and representatives at the summit:
Red Tape Challenge comments on health and safety legislation were fed into the independent Lofstedt Review. The Government supports Lofstedt’s recommendations and has committed to using the Red Tape Challenge process to go even further.
Some of the key commitments resulting from the Lofstedt Review are:
- To exempt from health and safety law around 1 million self-employed people whose work activities pose no potential risk of harm to others.
- The Health & Safety Executive (HSE) to review all its Approved Codes of Practice.
- The HSE to undertake a programme of sector-specific consolidations, by the end of 2014 (including sectors such as Mining).
- Giving HSE the authority to direct all Local Authority health and safety inspection and enforcement activity, to ensure it is consistent and targeted at the most risky workplaces.
Following the summit Families Against Corporate Killers issued a press statement in which a FACK spokesperson said:
“The Prime Minister and whole government continue to ignore us, the families of people killed at work because of far too little health and safety regulation, backed up by inadequate, toothless enforcement. They are intent on destroying even this inadequate safety net to please their business paymasters. Grayling, the Minister in charge of health and safety, has refused to meet us at least five times now. Cameron failed to reply to a letter we sent him expressing concern at his New Year’s Resolution to ‘kill off health and safety culture’ yet holds a Summit with the insurance companies and only hears the side of the story he wants to.
The contempt shown to us, the victims of poor regulation and lax enforcement and business criminality, is quite disgusting, but very much in line with this government’s utter contempt for ordinary people. The government is racing ahead to cut the lifelines for workers, based not on evidence or fact, but on the myths, lies and fairytales peddled by their moneyed business friends. Deaths at work have already gone up and far more workers are at risk as inspectors are banned from carrying out preventative inspections in workplaces newly classified ‘low risk’, such as farming, quarries and the docks.
This week we have seen some justice abroad in corporations being held to account for their criminal actions in damaging workers health and safety. In Italy on Monday two business men responsible for killing over 3,000 people by exposing them to asbestos were sentenced to 16 years in jail. Now Apple are being forced by campaigners to face up to the inhuman working conditions of the Chinese workers who make their products.
But in the UK we have a government intent not on protecting workers and families, but on racing to the bottom, removing their health and safety protection and allowing business to get away with as much as possible.
We fear more families will have to make our hellish, FACK ing journey. Will no rid us of this deadly government?”
Source: FACK / No 10 website
