Viewpoint – End of the line

The HSE is closing its Infoline service “in a move to improve efficiency further and deliver value for taxpayers”. Peter Rimmer looks back at the history of the service and examines the possible implications of the HSE’s decision.

In the mid-1990s, the HSE took a strategic decision to outsource its public enquiry handling, as the Public Enquiry Point in Sheffield was unable to cope. Demand exceeded the resources available, services were rationed and contact hours were cut, delays occurred, service levels declined, and complaints increased. A specification and tender were developed and, following an open competition, the HSE contracted its telephone enquiries out to environmental group, National Britannia.

On 1 July 1996 National Britannia launched the telephone enquiry service now known as the HSE Infoline from new premises in Caerphilly, south Wales. Infoline was designed to answer the majority of enquiries for information, help and advice from the public that had previously been handled by the HSE Information Centre and staff in HSE Offices.
Infoline did not give advice itself but transferred callers requiring professional, technical and policy advice, or interpretation of the law, to the relevant HSE operational or policy directorates and divisions. Infoline was linked to all HSE offices, and transferred callers who wanted to purchase priced publications, or order free leaflets, direct to HSE Books. The contract anticipated 100,000 calls a year but in its first 12 months, Infoline handled almost double that number of calls.

The HSE’s Information Centre continued to reply to letters, faxes and an increasing volume of e-mails until July 2000, when the Infoline contract was extended to handle written correspondence. A year later, National Britannia was successful in retendering for Infoline, and the contract was renewed for a further seven years.

Extension of the call centre to a Contact Centre gave the HSE a single point of contact, clear focus and greater control over incoming public enquiries. It also offered greater consistency in the replies provided by capitalising on the knowledge acquired in answering enquiries through the development of an extensive knowledge database, and through access to the HSE’s guidance publications and its ever-expanding website.

Infoline operators were trained in interviewing skills, telephone techniques and HSE procedures. All the operators were graduates and NEBOSH-qualified, or studying for a NEBOSH qualification.

Critically, the service relied on the provision of accurate and up-to-date information by HSE staff via the HSE contract manager. It was the responsibility of directorates and divisions in the HSE to supply briefings during major campaigns, or the launch of new regulations, in order to maintain the quality of the service and reduce the number of enquiries to the HSE.

Quality

By the end of 2003, the volume of telephone calls exceeded 250,000 a year, and written enquiries (faxes, letters and e-mails) were upwards of 30,000 a year. Infoline offered greater capacity to respond, with at least 80 per cent of all enquiries dealt with at first point of contact, i.e. without referral to anyone else, and 80 per cent of calls answered within 15 seconds. The call abandonment rate was less than 5 per cent. All written enquiries were completed within seven days, the majority within five days.¹

This compared very favourably with published Department for Work and Pensions standards of answering 80 per cent of calls within 30 seconds and responding to written or e-mail enquiries within 10 working days. All in all, Infoline provided a high-quality service – popular, well-managed and effective.

In August 2007, ownership transferred from National Britannia to Connaught, and then to Santia Ltd in September 2010, which subsequently became Santia Consulting Ltd earlier this year. In late 2009, Connaught commissioned a major survey of its customers’ experience. The outcome of this exercise was positive, and the following themes emerged:

• Mostly consistent – the majority of customers who used the service had a similar and positive experience, and those who re-used it found it mainly consistent;
• Mostly intentional – the process was well-managed and the operators, in particular, were well-trained and very helpful;
• Differentiated – there was no real competitive service but it was clearly the authority on providing HSE information; and
• Mostly valued – most people were very satisfied with the service; it could improve the speed of response (e-mail), the consistency of the information’s relevance, and the seamlessness between information and advice.

One area of minor criticism concerned the transfer of calls to HSE advisors, which appeared haphazard at times.

Efficiencies, cost-savings, or cuts?

With the end of the contract imminent later this year, the HSE took a decision not to enter into a new agreement but to provide an information service through its website. From 12 September 2011, statutory reporting to the HSE of work-related injuries and incidents under RIDDOR (the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1995) will move to a predominantly online system, although fatal and major injuries and incidents can still be reported to the HSE’s Incident Contact Centre by telephone. The Infoline telephone information service will end on 30 September 2011.

In the HSE’s view, as reported last month by SHP,2 “businesses or members of the public seeking information on health and safety can use the HSE’s website – a huge knowledge bank where people can access and download information on all aspects of work-related health and safety, as well as the HSE’s official guidance completely free of charge.

“Changes to the basic telephone information service are in line with the public sector-wide drive to deliver services more efficiently. The Infoline service currently offers callers basic information that is publicly available and can be easily accessed on the HSE website. The HSE’s website is already overwhelmingly the most popular option for accessing health and safety information, with 100 times more visitors than Infoline has callers.”

Changes to incident reporting and the closure of Infoline are expected to save the HSE £7 million over five years. The Infoline contract costs about

£1 million a year, which works out at about £3 an enquiry; a Web visit costs the equivalent of 7p, which means that the estimated annual cost of the HSE website is about £1.8 million, or almost double the cost of Infoline.³
So, there appears to be some confusion in the HSE case between efficiency and effectiveness, as well as a failure to acknowledge that the closure of Infoline is a cut in services, with the prime objective of saving money.

Implications

So, who will answer enquiries after Infoline closes? According to the HSE: “People will not be able to ring up for information. If they do, they will be referred to the HSE website or asked to call another helpline or consultancy number.”² The HSE will not answer enquiries by phone, letter, fax or e-mail; enquirers will be told to look at the website. So, is the HSE abdicating responsibility for providing help, guidance and advice?

Section 11(2) of the Health and Safety at Work, etc. Act 1974 requires the HSC/E to “to make such arrangements as it considers appropriate for securing that government departments, employers, employees, organisations representing employers and employees respectively, and other persons concerned with matters relevant to any of those purposes are provided with an information and advisory service and are kept informed of, and adequately advised on, such matters…”

The decision to close Infoline without any compatible alternative comes hot on the heels of the HSE’s decision to stop proactive inspections in the majority of sectors, and demonstrates an about-turn in its policy of engagement and partnership in support of a prevention culture. Much of the advice, guidance and good practice assembled by the HSE over many years derives from answering enquiries and from its proactive engagement with stakeholders.

Information vs knowledge

So, let’s start with the biggest issue of all: people do not appear to understand the difference between information and knowledge. Information is thrown at people every day in every walk of life, but the translation of that information into useful and practical knowledge is rare. In the workplace, if translated or interpreted incorrectly, it can put people at greater risk.

The relationships among data, information, knowledge and wisdom in a hierarchical arrangement have been part of the language of information science for many years, embedded in the acronym DIKW – shorthand for the data-to-information-to-knowledge-to-wisdom transformation.⁴

Information is essentially useful data with meaning and purpose, whereas knowledge is a mix of experience, values, context, insight and intuition.^4,5 Wisdom is the ability to increase effectiveness. Wisdom adds value, which requires the mental function that we call judgment.⁶

The HSE’s statistics are undeniable, and it is not surprising that there are 100 times more visitors to the website than there are to Infoline. But they are very different media and very different channels of communication. Many of the Infoline callers may have searched the website in vain for information without success and therefore need help; many others will use the website after contacting Infoline. They are not mutually exclusive; one supports the other.

The nub of the debate is about cost-cutting and transferring costs to employers and the public, but the real issue is about the cost to workers’ health, safety and well-being. So, there is confusion between saving lives and livelihoods and saving taxpayers’ money.

The key benefits of a single enquiry point are that it provides knowledge as well as information, and that it handles enquiries in a consistent and coherent way, providing quality information in a timely fashion. Knowledge is a most precious commodity, built over time, honed and refined, and shared with others. It is the nourishment of a civilised society.

The amount of information on the HSE website is undeniably impressive but this, in itself, gives rise to problems of accessibility, finding the required information in the right form, and knowing how to navigate round a huge database of information. Most OSH websites, including the HSE’s, describe the causes and symptoms but rarely the solutions; the ‘How to…’’ is often missing and, for the most part, this is exactly what people need to know.

Jane Hext, managing director of Santia, the health and safety risk-management firm that operates the Infoline service on behalf of the HSE, expressed concern over the consequences of closing this valuable resource: “We understand that in today’s current climate of cutbacks, government departments have to tighten their belts [but] the Government’s recently published plans, ‘Good health and safety, good for everyone’, talk about making things easier for small businesses and improving access to information. It is hard to see how the decision to close these services squares with this.”²

The future

Is the HSE moving rapidly into a ‘silo of secrecy’ and slipping towards anonymity? Telephone numbers of local HSE offices have been removed from the HSE website, and no doubt will be removed from telephone directories too, leaving employers and workers in urgent need of assistance only able to contact their local office by fax or letter. And, of course, in the reply they will be told to look at the website!

There is a lack of openness and no engagement, and the move to ‘virtual information’, with no checks and balances, is a worrying trend not only for the HSE but also across government departments and agencies.

No proactive inspection effectively means no practical advice and guidance because there will be fewer opportunities to learn from inspection activity, engagement with duty-holders, enquiry handling, and from frequently asked questions, all of which combine to build a knowledge base not only for the HSE but also for the wider health and safety community.

Meanwhile, the HSE continues to refute the myths about health and safety but engages in its own mythology. Is this ‘the end of the line’ or the beginning of the end for the HSE?    

References
1    HSE communications audit, 2003
2    SHP (May 2011): ‘HSE decides it’s good NOT to talk’ – www.shponline.co.uk/news-content/full/hse-decides-it-s-good-not-to-talk
3    HSE 2011
4    Wallace, D P (2007): ‘Knowledge management: historical and cross-disciplinary themes’, Libraries Unlimited, pp1-14 ISBN 9781591585022
5    Davenport, T H, Prusak, L (1998): ‘Working knowledge: How organisations manage what they know’, Harvard Business School Press, p5, ISBN 0585056560
6    Rowley, J and Harley, R (2006): Organising knowledge: An introduction to managing access to information, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, pp5-6, ISBN 9780754644316

Peter Rimmer is a former director of communications with the HSE.

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