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Mr. Etherington: My hon. Friend's confidence will not have been boosted when he was recently made aware that one of the companies will get its rolling stock from a museum, where it has resided for a number of years, because it is felt to be more suitable than what it is running at the moment.

Mr. Eastham: That certainly fits the bill. Those are the quality and standards to which we can look forward in this great revolutionary improvement. The Government call it privatisation and get away with it. I wonder why people are not outraged, and not practically running to the barricades to say, "We are not having any more of this." The Government get away with it for now, but they will not at the next general election, because many of those bright young fellas on the Conservative Benches will not be Members of Parliament any more, that is for sure.

Can we honestly say that enough inspections are being made? Nowadays, life is far more sophisticated. Equipment in homes and factories is far more sophisticated. It is not like it was a hundred years ago. Surely there should be more health and safety inspections, not fewer. I believe that, under the guise of deregulation, the Government hope to reincarnate 19th-century working conditions. That is what they call progress at the end of the 20th century.

9.2 pm

Mr. Peter Butler (Milton Keynes, North-East): I declare an interest as a non-executive director of Stephens Itex Ltd., manufacturer and supplier of safety equipment, which appears in the Register of Members' Interests.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Manchester, Blackley (Mr. Eastham). I have been professionally involved as a lawyer in cases of death and serious injury. I do not need to read a booklet to find out the horror that it causes and the problems that arise from it. Nor, I accept, does he, as his record on this is excellent. I agree that this is an extraordinarily serious matter.

It is not correct, as the hon. Gentleman implied, to say that privatisation--I prefer to call it denationalisation--of the railway industry will lead to lower safety standards,

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and it is irresponsible of him to run that scare. I make the point that the Government adopted in full, without quibble or hesitation, every one of the more than30 recommendations that the Health and Safety Executive made on privatisation in its report to the Select Committee on Transport.

Mr. Eastham: It is one thing for the Government to accept those recommendations, but how can we be sure that they will be implemented when we already know that there is a massive shortage of inspectors? How can we be sure that inspections will take place? It is one thing to put that on paper, but it is another to ensure that they happen.

Mr. Butler: In law, we used to call that alternative pleading. The hon. Gentleman stands up and says that nothing is being done; he then stands up and says that it may be being done, but how do we know that it is effective? I do not accept his cynicism. Nor do I accept that the denationalised railways will want to kill their employees and injure their passengers. That is absurd. They will want to sell tickets and carry passengers; it will be the first time in my adult life that that happens on the railways.

I reject the Opposition's claim that our safety record as bad and, by implication, that the Health and Safety Executive is ineffectual. That is what they are saying when they claim that we have a bad record and that the system does not work. I want to record my rejection of both those contentions. I also want to take this opportunity to record the respect felt by all Conservative Members for the work done over the past 21 years by the HSE. I am sorry that its work is not recognised by the Labour party.

I remind the House that fatal injuries among employees, the self-employed and the public fell from 499 in 1986-87 to 381 in 1994-95. Fatal injuries per 100,000 employees in all industries fell from 2.8 in the year the HSE began its work to 0.9 last year--the lowest rate ever recorded. That is not a record of failure and ineptitude; it is a record of success, and substantially under this Government. Fatal injury rates in the construction industry are at their lowest on record--again, not the record of failure that the Opposition portray for the HSE. In the mines, the rate for fatal injuries is less than half the rate in the year that the HSE began its work--again, not a history of failure.

The Labour party is obsessed by the railways. I look forward to using them more in future, especially as the fatal injury rate for employees has fallen from 18.7 to 7.7 per 100,000 employees--a very low rate indeed. Those are not records of failure; they are records of success.

Mr. Clapham: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the contribution of employees through their safety committees has played an important part in reducing accident rates?

Mr. Butler: I accept that the habit of safety, to which I shall refer later, is extremely important, not just among employees but among employers. However, I reject the suggestion by the hon. Member for Blackley that small businesses do not seem to know that they are required to have health and safety policies. That is not my experience of the excellent small businesses that I have visited in

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Milton Keynes, nor do I believe it to be generally true. It is an unfortunate slur on the major providers of new employment.

Mr. Walter Sweeney (Vale of Glamorgan): Is my hon. Friend aware that, in the last year alone, the HSE has issued more than 10,000 notices and dealt with many thousands of cases? The trend in the level of accidents is downwards.

Mr. Butler: I confirm what my hon. Friend says and I congratulate the HSE on its success--a success that has been enabled by the policies of this Government.

For the Opposition motion to be at all credible, we would have to believe that the Government were doing a complete volte face--or, to use the Opposition's expression, a U-turn--and suddenly neglecting the very issue on which they have been so successful.

Mr. Eastham: The hon. Gentleman took me to task for suggesting that there were not proper health and safety statements. Under the heading "Failure to write a health and safety policy", an article in "The Perfect Crime" states:

"Since the end of May, Jeffrey Hughes, the warehouse transport manager, has been given the additional responsibility for health and safety. He told the Health and Safety Executive that there is not a current health and safety policy for the company as far as I am aware."

Mr. Butler: The fact that there is one thief does not make everyone a thief, and the fact that one small business is identified as being without a policy does not justify the hon. Gentleman's general attack on small businesses. That is perhaps the Opposition's knee-jerk reaction to the very companies that provide employment.

I should like to draw attention to the deceitful nature of the motion's wording. It refers to accidents causing more than 30,000 deaths and major injuries. Why have those categories been lumped together? The answer is that there have been fewer than 400 deaths, and if the Opposition motion had made that clear, the success of the Government's policies on health and safety would have been obvious. Instead of making it obvious, they obfuscate and run the figures together to hide the fact that the number of deaths is at an all-time low. There is no prevarication, no ifs and buts, no allowing for this or that, no on the one hand or the other about the matter. The number of deaths is at a straightforward, all-time low, and the Opposition have tried to hide it in the wording of their motion.

The Opposition also refer to the fact that more than 138,000 injuries involved three or more days off work in 1994-95. The House will be interested to know that, on Second Reading on the Health and Safety at Work, etc. Bill, on 3 April 1974--today is almost its anniversary--the then Secretary of State for Employment said that 1,000 people had been killed, 500,000 had been injured and23 million working days had been lost through injury. To reach anything like those figures, each of the accidents to which the motion refers would have to result in about137 working days being lost. The Opposition are attempting to hide the success of the health and safety policies over the past many years.

The Robens report said that the

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"discussion on health and safety at work should play as prominent a part in our debates as should discussion about industrial relations".

With the greatest respect, he was wrong. Health and safety now properly plays a much larger part in our discussions than debates on historical facts about bad industrial relations.

The Health and Safety at Work, etc. Act 1974 gave the Health and Safety Commission what was described as "sharper, longer and tougher teeth". I think that since then there has been some capping, a little bit of dental work and the odd bridge here and there, if I may use the sort of terminology that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary is likely to use in his winding-up speech. The effect is that the commission can still chew and take a firm grip where necessary.

The Bill was of course introduced by the Conservatives, and adds to our record on health and safety, to which my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Colchester, North(Mr. Jenkin) referred, which includes the first Factory Acts and the Offices, Shops and Railway Premises Act 1963, which was relatively new when the Bill was passed. The Conservative Bill was resurrected by Labour when it surprisingly took power. I was going to say that it was supported by both the Liberals present on Second Reading in 1974 and that that was exactly twice the number of Liberals present in this debate, but the one Liberal Democrat who was present left about five minutes after the debate started.

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