At our recent meeting with the new minister for health and safety, Lord McKenzie of Luton, we found common ground on some core issues: promoting the value of good health and safety advice, dealing with those who give poor advice and the need to improve schools’ understanding of sensible risk management.
IOSH president Lisa Fowlie, immediate past president Neil Budworth, and director of technical affairs Richard Jones met with Lord McKenzie in April.
As expected, occupational health and welfare reform were issues high on Lord McKenzie’s agenda and he welcomed IOSH’s ideas on ‘sustainable rehabilitation’, our pioneering new occupational health toolkit and also our young people campaign. Our team were delighted at Lord McKenzie’s request to visit schools to see the new Workplace Hazard Awareness Course material in action — something which has now been arranged.
Lord McKenzie urged the HSE and IOSH to continue to work more closely together and felt that the issue of a competency statement needed more debate. He was also keen to see more work on understanding sensible risk in schools and the education sector in general.
Lisa said: “This was a really useful and interesting meeting and enabled us to both put our case, and to understand what concerns those at the heart of government. It was good to hear that Lord McKenzie is passionate about occupational health, and the role of safety and health practitioners, and that he understood our concerns about unqualified rogue traders in our profession.”
Neil added: “This was a positive meeting and we have a number of action points to follow through. We’re certainly looking forward to working with Lord McKenzie and are pleased he shares our view on tackling the crazy decisions that are sometimes made in the name of health and safety — especially in schools — and getting decisions made in a more sensible way. We’ll be raising this issue of school risk assessments at the next IOSH/HSE quarterly meeting.”
The IOSH team have also recently met with Dr Bill Gunnyeon, the chief medical adviser at the Department for Work and Pensions, and Dame Carol Black, the National Director for Health and Work.
At these meetings we discussed how IOSH members can contribute to improving the health of the working population. IOSH has also continued to lobby MPs and met with Baroness Thornton, a staunch campaigner on social and public health issues, and a close political ally of Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
