British Safety Council’s archive now online

Today the British Safety Council (BSC) has released its digital archive, covering the 60 years of its life and really showing how ideas about health and safety in Britain have changed since 1957.

 

Mike has been advising the BSC on its archive and making best use of its past – and in the project, we benefitted from this, as we were able to visit the archive in person and get early access to its wealth of insight. Contained within the archive are a good run of the BSC’s posters from the 1970s to the present, a complete run of the BSC’s newspaper and magazine publications from 1957, minutes of the BSC’s meetings, reports produced by the BSC and press coverage. It’s a fantastic resource for health and safety practitioners, for historians of health and safety – and indeed for anyone interested in Britain’s social and cultural history.

 

In the archive we can see a gradual increase in concern about workplace health, for example, or the prominence of the EU (Brexit only adds a piquancy to the ‘the load must not be too heavy for Europeans to lift’ poster).

European load, BSC poster  Asbestos kills, BSC poster

Manual work, including using machinery, features strongly – but increasingly over the years office work becomes more visible.

Little chap  1988 office safety, BSC

It’s also interesting to see how ideas about gender have played out – reflecting their times, much of the older material plays to men, featuring women only as sex objects. Later material is more balanced, particularly as more and more women entered the workplace. And of course we can get at ideas about masculinity, as well – a recurring motif is the idea of not being too tough for first aid, for example.

1972 first aid

Although the majority of the archive material focuses on occupational issues, from the outset this was understood in very broad terms, something reflected in the archive which highlights the BSC’s involvement in pretty much every aspect of accident prevention imaginable – including things like consumer safety, healthy beaches, DIY, women’s safety, AIDS, fireworks, children’s playgrounds and more.

 

Needless to say, there’s plenty more in the archive than this quick outline – the best way to get an idea about it is to visit it yourself: https://services.storetec.net/?u=public@bsc.org&p=FreelyDeal42

 

(All images: courtesy British Safety Council)

Regulating ‘Live Volcanoes’: Health and Safety in Public

 

Images from Inquiry into Disaster at Nypro (UK) Ltd, Flixborough on 1/6/1974 (Official Report),via National Archive TS 84/37/1

Images from Inquiry into Disaster at Nypro (UK) Ltd, Flixborough on 1/6/1974 (Official Report),via National Archive TS 84/37/1New Picture (1)

“He [a senior HSE figure] put his hand up and said, ‘no, no, no, stop my boy, stop…that’s worker safety. That’s a dead volcano’, he said. ‘The live volcano is public safety. That is what’s going to energise everyone’.” [R. Bibbings interview, para.19]

One of the most pronounced shifts to have taken place in the last fifty years of health and safety regulation has been a movement towards recognising workplace risks that affect the general public. It is probably fair to say that the earliest eras of health and safety provision did not look beyond the factory or workshop in terms of their scope; indeed, most of the Factories Acts were explicitly limited in terms of the types of workplaces and industries in which they applied. But health and safety today is something that is understood as encompassing all areas of human activity, from education, to recreation, to work, to the use of public space. For many people, this ‘creep’ of health and safety into all areas of life is one of the key reasons for questioning the legitimacy of the law, and negative media coverage of health and safety does place an emphasis on the social, rather than the workplace, aspect of the issue. So when, and how, did this shift occur?

A review of the historical material suggests that the ‘public’ element was relatively little discussed before the 1970s, even in the aftermath of major events like Aberfan (which were seen as ‘public safety’ rather than ‘health and safety’ issues). The turning points appear to be twofold. While the Offices, Shops, and Railway Premises Act 1963 had broadened the scope of the workplaces in which health and safety risks were recognised, it was the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act s.3 which turned attention to ‘public’ safety risks. This had been introduced in part because of the Flixborough explosion in 1974, which showed the potential of high-hazard risks to ‘cross the factory fence’ and affect local communities. Even then, however, the potential of this extension of coverage was not really appreciated or recognised – policy observers from the time have confirmed that, in the words of a former civil servant (and HSE Director-General):

“Robens did envisage that there would be some limited duties towards the public. But…at the time when the Act was going through, I don’t think that the very extensive ways in which public health and safety have come into play was envisaged.” [J. Bacon interview, para.23]

The second turning point was the mid-1980s, when three factors coincided to make public opinion a key player in regulatory thinking. A combination of the politicisation of issues of regulation and government intervention (particularly by the EC) by the Thatcher governments, a series of major disasters affecting the public and workers between 1987-9 (including the Herald of Free Enterprise and Marchioness sinkings, Piper Alpha, Hillsborough, and the Clapham rail crash), and HSE’s efforts to account for growing concern over major hazard sites (mainly nuclear power, and especially post-Chernobyl) as part of their new Tolerability of Risk Framework (1988) meant that suddenly, what the man in the street thought mattered a great deal more than it had in the past. Not only was more evidence then gathered about public opinion, but the balancing approach to be adopted became more explicit. While the initial assessments of both tolerability and preference looked at high-hazard issues, the legislative and policy framework that was created was soon providing a basis for judgements about an ever-widening array of sectors and issues.

In this way, the new focus on principled, evidence-led decision-making, coupled with the ability of s.3 HSWA to apply to people outside the workplace, would change the face of health and safety regulation forever. It remains an irony that the movement towards applying the law to ‘crazy’ cases like so-called bans on playing conkers in schools, was driven in part by the need to respond to some of the most hazardous workplace dangers imaginable, and a desire for greater rationality.

An introduction to archival research

In the middle of July, the project’s ongoing archival research programme turned its attention to the holdings at the Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading, which include some relevant and interesting materials, particularly relating to the National Union of Agricultural Workers (NUAW). Mike and Laura, who have been conducting the archival work to date, booked in for a day at MERL, and this provided a chance for Paul and Carmen to head down the hill from Whiteknights to learn more about the process of archival research at first hand.

The single most striking observation that Carmen and I made, as novice archive-miners, was the degree of discernment/intuition/expertise needed to search through the catalogues to work out exactly what it is you want to look at. It sounds obvious, but when there are large holdings, and much that is available only via request from the archive (so the friendly local archivist must locate the boxes in storage and deliver them to you), a good deal of decision-making is required to ensure that efforts are focused on the right materials, or at least in the directions that are most likely to be productive. The value of this became apparent as we began sifting through the contents of the first boxes – the Minutes of the Health Safety and Welfare Committee of the NUAW. Each bundle of documents took some time to read for relevant material, and this made that initial search and sort task even more important.

merl

The MERL Reading Room.

The second observation was about the needs and conventions of the particular research context. Many of the materials we were dealing with were more than fifty years old and needed careful handling; the reading room at MERL was full of researchers working on their own projects, making it important for us to be quiet and considerate to others; and the rules of the archive (sign in and provide ID; no pens, only pencils!) must be respected. We also learned the methods involved in using a digital SLR camera to photograph copies of documents for future reference, and the need for careful recording of what you had looked at and in what order!

But the most important lesson learned was the value and insight that comes from engaging with historical materials at first hand. Like a sleuth from a detective novel, finding a snippet of info in a document, snapping a picture, and then following the lead as it develops felt like a real thrill. As an example, I was lucky enough to get the box containing the NUAW H+S Committee minutes from 1970-75 – so contemporary with the Robens Report of 1972 and the passing of the HSWA 1974. It was exciting to track the initial concerns raised by the NUAW about the exclusion of agricultural workers from the scope of the Robens Report, through to evidence of the to-and-fro with government over this issue, and then to the efforts to understand the implications of the general duties contained in HSWA 1974 ss.2-3 (which apply to all employees and others affected by business activities) for farm workers.

It was even more exciting to cross-reference these concerns to contemporaneous evidence from Hansard, to see when and how these issues were raised within the legislative process, including by a youthful Neil Kinnock during Commons debate on 21/05/1973. We also located evidence as to controversies during the post-1974 implementation of the new law, including the ongoing argument (1974-6) between the NUAW and the Country Landowners Association about whether agricultural workplaces should be excluded from the scope of the new unified inspectorate (the HSE) and, by 1978, the emergence of disquiet about the limitations of tripartite working within Industry Advisory Committees.

Overall, the real benefit of going back to the archives is that the sources force us not to take for granted any of our contemporary assumptions about the Robens era. Consensual and tripartite working was shaky in practice; unified inspection and legislation was never a foregone conclusion; and the implications and meanings of the broad duties within the HSWA 1974 took time to be recognised and understood. Reform was thus an ongoing process, not a single event, and that is a crucial realisation for the rest of this project.

Paul

 

Archive research update

The historical part of the project (based at the University of Portsmouth) is now well underway, and over the past three weeks Mike Esbester and Laura Mayne have been visiting archives and collecting information on relevant collections across the UK.

In particular we’re looking for sources which will show how social, political and economic factors have influenced perceptions of the legitimacy of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) in Britain since 1960. In essence, have attitudes changed? If they have, how and why? And how do we go about investigating this?

One of the main points of interest for the project will be the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick. Collections held at Warwick include the records of the Trade Union Congress, papers of many trade unions (Including, for example, the Transport and General Workers Union) as well as records of labour organisations and employment welfare bodies like the Industrial Welfare Society.

The National Archives also hold a wealth of relevant information like the records of the Health and Safety Executive (1969-2006) and the papers of the Factory Inspectorate. We’re also particularly interested in practitioner organisations concerned with OHS in Britain, and the archives of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents promise a number of exciting sources.

Media sources are invaluable for examining popular opinion and discourses about health and safety and how this changes over time. The British Library Newspaper Archive will be useful for discussion of OHS in the media, whilst a number of press archives have been digitised, such as the Times Digital Archive and UK Press Online.

A number of TV, film and radio archives are also available online, and so far Laura’s been involved in identifying these and in sourcing programmes discussing OHS (such as current affairs programmes like Panorama). Other moving image/audiovisual archives like British Pathe Newsreels will also be useful, and material is being sourced from the British Film Institute.

Hopefully this brief post provides an idea of how the Portsmouth-based aspect of the project is developing, and we’ll aim to keep the blog updated with more information as research continues and we get further into the archival research.

New appointments and progress

We are delighted to announce that two Research Assistants have been apointed to work on the project with us – Carmen D’Cruz, who will be based at the University of Reading School of Law, and Laura Mayne, who will be based at the University of Portsmouth School of of Social, Historical and Literary Studies. They will be working during 2014 to bring the project to fruition, engaging with archival, empirical, and documentary sources to gain new insights into change over time.

As such, we will be looking for relevant archival sites and sources that really speak to the realities of health and safety regulation, policy, and change since 1960, and will also be looking to interview key players from the worlds of policy, industry, regulation, and the trade unions. If you have ideas about sources, or things that we should definitely be looking for, then please do get in touch or drop us a comment via this blog site! Thank you!

Paul and Mike