How times have changed...

Louis Wustemann | Feature | HSW
17.12.2007

Not surprisingly, it's the superficial things that strike you first: the advertisements for protective clothing with flared trousers and shirt collars wide enough to land a plane on, the dated typefaces, and the monochrome pages (editorial colour was restricted to the cover and some grisly pictures of injured fingers in a first-aid article).

But closer inspection of HSW's launch issue in September 1978 gives more serious insights into how much the health and safety world has changed.

Robens' realm

The magazine launched into a health and safety world which was, in 1978, just beginning to learn the implications of a whole new order, in which the Health and Safety at Work Act had taken over three years earlier from the Factories Acts as the principal statute. The "new Act", as it was known, extended the responsibility to safeguard employees as far as was reasonably practicable to all employers for the first time.

The Act was, along with the Health and Safety Commission (HSC) and the HSE, the progeny of the commission headed by Lord Robens which reported in 1972 and made various recommendations for the reform of health and safety regulation.

Our first issue is littered with more references to the Robens report than to the Act, understandably so, since the Act was partly the enabling legislation for a suite of new Robens-inspired regulations which were set to keep health and safety professionals occupied for the next decade and beyond.

The ones that loomed largest in September 1978 were the Safety Representatives and Safety Committees Regulations 1977 (SRSCR) which were due to take effect the next month, giving union-appointed safety reps across industry rights they had only enjoyed to a limited degree in some sectors, such as mining, to information and consultation on employers' safety performance.

HSW's first editor David Farmer set out all these new rights, which still stand and have been supplemented by rights for employee reps in non-unionised workplaces in subsequent legislation.

Our launch year also coincided with the gearing up of the second great engine driving health and safety legislation in the past 30 years. In 1978 the then European Economic Community (EEC), which the UK had joined only five years before, launched its first health and safety action programme.

HSW's deputy editor John Manos (who now edits our stablemate Occupational Health Review) outlined the programme's goals to improve consideration of safety at the design stage of workplace machinery, improve accident and disease prevention strategies through education and training, and increase the data on accident causation. Manos noted that before the action programme, "minimal specific health and safety legislation has been proposed to date" by the EEC.

In the coming years, the community and later the European Union was to make up for lost time with a raft of Directives including those that led in 1992 to the "six pack" of UK laws that includes the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations, the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations and the Display Screen Equipment Regulations.

Safety first

In its 1978 incarnation, HSW was recognisably a safety magazine aimed at members of the then 3000-strong Institution of Industrial Safety Officers (IISO) whose approach is summed up by Lawrence Waterman (ex-president of the IISO's later incarnation, the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health) as "hard hats, safety boots and goggles and you are working in construction or engineering."

Our first issue carried articles on entanglement in lathes and safe use of forklifts and plenty of discussion of manufacturing hazards (in fact, almost throughout the emphasis is on hazards rather than risks, which would come to dominate the health and safety environment later on). Waterman says the extension of safety management to offices and other low-risk environments under the new Act had yet to grip.

Health matters definitely took second place to safety in our pages. There are a few references to toxicology and occupational exposure limits for solvents but no discussion of musculosketal disorders and certainly nothing on stress, one of the major health issues of our own decade.

But one article, penned by "our medical correspondent", makes a plea for doctors to take more interest in occupational medicine and to swell the numbers of the then newly-created faculty of occupational medicine at the Royal College of Physicians.

Here is an issue that has not gone away. A group of occupational physicians under the leadership of the HSE's head scientist has recently raised concerns over the state of occupational medicine training with the government's chief scientist, echoing the concerns expressed in 1978.

"All doctors should be concerned with what happens to their patients for half their waking hours," argued our correspondent, lamenting the lack of understanding among general practitioners of the rehabilitative potential of work as well as its capacity to cause or exacerbate sickness.

This complaint also has a contemporary ring, and engaging GPs in rehabilitation and fitness-for-work issues is one of the topics Dame Carol Black is studying in her role as national director for health and work.

For the better

If there are some problems that the passage of three decades seems to have done nothing to ameliorate, it's also true that in some critical areas, we can take pride in real progress.

"The Robens Report recorded that in the decade to 1970 something like 1000 people were killed at work each year, half a million were injured and 23 million days were lost annually through industrial injury and disease," noted John Humphrey, senior industrial safety consultant at insurance brokers Bland Payne, in an article on loss control.

Though commentators rightly expressed alarm at the rise in workplace fatalities to 241 in 2006, we should not forget that deaths are now a quarter of the annual level in the 1970s. Reported workplace injuries are also at about one-third of the half million quoted by Humphrey.

This reduction is in part due to changes in the nature of work and the shift from manual jobs to sedentary service work, but it also shows the effect of the 1974 Act and the legislation that stemmed from it and the enforcement and encouragement activities of the HSE and local authorities over the years.

It also reflects the growth of a health and safety "culture" in reputable business. Lawrence Waterman (who in his current post as head of safety at the Olympic Delivery Authority supervising Europe's largest construction project is aiming for an extraordinary target of no more than one lost-time injury per million hours worked) notes that the emphasis on compliance rather than best practice in our launch issue is another sign of how times have changed.

"That almost exclusive reliance on the law demonstrates the relative immaturity of health and safety in that era," he says, "because it meant it was a 'walk away' standard, whereas now the best organisations put a huge amount of effort into being marginally better."

In its present, much altered, form, HSW aims to bring its readership a balance of intelligence on innovative practice and advice on keeping on the right side of the law, and to reflect the growing importance of health and absence management alongside traditional safety issues.

Which is only to say we are trying as hard to serve the needs of our readers today as our predecessors did at the magazine's launch 30 years ago.

Other articles reflecting on the changes to the health and safety landscape over the past 30 years will follow during 2008.