Health & Safety: Stay Woke!

 

I enjoyed a couple of days walking in the Yorkshire Dales on Monday and Tuesday this week, our little group undeterred by the rain and gales that ushered in the New Year - somehow we had picked the intersection of two yellow level weather warnings for our hikes.

Monday was the easier day though and through the slowly clearing mist, we came within view of the iconic Ribblehead viaduct.

It is an imposing sight, even from over a mile away, beloved of both walkers and railway enthusiasts. Yet it is also a tragic one.

Constructed in the early 1870s, the viaduct and nearby Bleamoor rail tunnel were the last major works in the UK constructed purely by hand: no machines, just human and animal labour. Miles from any towns, the workers and often their families lived in a shanty settlement next to their work site in dangerous, unsanitary and exposed conditions.

Over 400 people died on the site from work accidents and disease over about three years of construction. Some 200 were buried in the churchyard at nearby Chapel-le-Dale, the dead far outnumbering the living in the tiny hamlet. We visited it and saw a tiny plaque that commemorates them there today. It is a shocking testimony of what happens in an unregulated, profit-focussed economy.

These days, of course, the media and many populist commentators and grifter politicians rubbish our modern health and safety laws as "woke", denouncing them as nonsensical - the implication being that they are not needed.

Yet consider this: before the Health & Safety at Work Act came into force just over 50 years ago in October 1974, the carnage from Ribblehead and Bleamoor continued in workplaces throughout the UK. There was some safety legislation, but it was piecemeal and often poorly enforced, if at all.

In 1947, just under 1,700 people died from workplace accidents in British mines, quarries, factories and railways alone: no figures were collected for other sectors.

Many more were injured and a 1958 report estimated over 2 million workers had chronic work-related respiratory illnesses. Even in 1974, in the year the Health and Safety at Work Act was implemented, nearly 2 people died every day in workplace accidents - 651 in total.

Five decades on, and with a significantly larger workforce, deaths have fallen drastically - 138 in 2023/4, a decline of nearly 80% since the law (and subsequent amendments and regulations) was introduced. The UK faces many problems and more still needs to be done, but, in the formal economy at least, it is one of the safest places to work. Thousands of lives have been saved, and possibly millions of injuries avoided.

So, next time we hear the agents of chaos declare we don't need "woke" safety rules, let's stay awake. It's the least we can do for those souls lost hacking their way through the Yorkshire hills all these years ago.