Health and Safety Executive

So essentially, um, he's very experienced, he's very experienced in, in regulation.

He was the, uh, chief exec of, uh, the Health and Safety Executive for a period of time.

Um, and he, he undertook a lot of confidential, um, interviews with stakeholders across, uh, all of the areas that we cover.

Um, he did his own piece of analysis and then he brought in an expert panel, um, to, uh, help him formulate his view.

I would reiterate, um, one other point, which is that wherever there is work undertaken at any site, the importance of public safety and the safety of the workforce that are involved is absolutely paramount.

And of course, that will require interaction with the regulatory powers of the Health and Safety Executive, which should be applied in all appropriate circumstances.

Carol Kerr.

Thank you, Presiding Officer.

So- That, that could've...

I think the Health and Safety Executive would've had something to say about that- Yeah ... for the work pr- So- Yeah, what happened? Explain ...

so, uh, that, that one, he, um, I was out netting in the pond at the time.

Again, there's another video on my Instagram of it, and they're up on this dam wall, and all you can hear is Slim going, "Lower, lower, lower.

The blast released toxic vapors and resulted in twenty-two fatalities while killing dozens more, forcing an industry-wide review of process safety.

Following Flixborough, the UK government commissioned the Committee on Safety at Work in 1964, leading to the Health and Safety Executive's formation a decade later.

Earlier legislative efforts began with the Factory Act 1833, which sought to limit child labor but also introduced basic firefighting measures in mills.

But it was the Mines Regulation Act of 1840 that first required regular ventilation inspections in collieries and established a system for recording underground methane.

The 1940 Hertford munitions explosion, caused by a mismanaged mixture of propellants, killed nineteen workers, forcing the establishment of more rigorous quality control protocols.

After the war, Britain’s experience with industrial hazards fed into the creation of comprehensive welfare legislation in 1948, notably the Industrial Welfare Act, which expanded employer responsibilities.

The evolution continued as the Health and Safety at Work, et cetera, Act of 1974 codified all preceding measures and established the Health and Safety Executive as a watchdog over every workplace.

Today, we take for granted that factories are inspected, boilers are monitored by pressure gauges, and miners wear breathing apparatus, thanks to the lessons learned from those early disasters.

The fire spread the way it did because the building had been clad in materials that the regulatory system was supposed to have caught and didn't.

In the months that followed, the UK government commissioned the Hackett review, led by Dame Judith Hackett, a senior engineer and former chair of health and safety executive.

Her report described the entire UK building regulatory system as not fit for purpose, identifying what she called a race to the bottom in which companies competed to do the work as cheaply as possible.

Construction is one of the most dangerous industries in the world.

Many of them helped shape the Building Safety Act 2022.

The act did three structural things.

First, it created a single building safety regulator inside the Health and Safety Executive with oversight of higher risk buildings from design through occupation.

One regulator, one clear source of accountability.

And it's very wrong that many of these decisions have been taken away from politics in the interests of trusting the experts.

And would you therefore also get rid of the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Health and Safety Executive and Ofsted?

So each of those will be reviewed.

The OBR we are committing to keep for the time being.

Likewise, I mean, the Bank of England itself is an independent, is a quango of the state, very old one, and the extent to which their independence over monetary policy needs to be reviewed.

But the principle that monetary policy is set by the independent bank, that fiscal policy is reviewed by the OBR, those are principles we are committing to, but we are not satisfied with the way they work at the moment.

The Health and Safety Executive clearly needs significant reform.

It needs to be properly under the oversight of ministers.

The interrogation room barred from the plant's visitors and it felt too bright, stripped of its safety first posters and already damp with evening chill.

An investigator from the Health and Safety Executive Blackcoat tired eyes asked me questions that made little sense, as if he expected me to explain how, precisely, a memory engraved itself onto the atmosphere.

He wanted sequence, logic, chemicals.

I gave him what occurred, the overlays, the vent circuits, the signatures on the death notes.