Select Committee Hearings on Health and
Safety at Work
I have been contacted by the LGA who informed
me that the report prepared by the Centre for Corporate Accountability
on health and safety enforcement is being presented to the Select
Committee you are Chairing. This report contains a factual error
in that Lambeth did not carry out zero inspections in 1999-2000
as it states.
The first we knew about the publication of this
report was when an article appeared about it in the Environmental
Health weekly magazine "Environmental Health News" on
10 October 2003. This was discussed with the editor and subsequently
with the HSE's Local Authority Unit to establish the figures differed.
For your assistance I enclose copies of the relevant emails between
the editor of "Environmental Health News" and I at that
time which includes the figures from our monitoring data. An editor's
note apologising for publishing this error appeared the following
week on 17 October 2003.
It seems that somewhere between the information
leaving here and arriving on the HSE's database, the data disappeared.
We were not aware of this until the article appeared. I do not
believe that the HSE sold the information on to the Centre for
Corporate Accountability with any malice and similarly I do not
consider that the subsequent report cited Lambeth in any mischievous
manner as the data had been gained from a credible source. The
fact remains however that the original data source from four years
ago was flawed and so gives a misleading picture.
I do hope this is of assistance to the Select
Committee.
Roger Slaughter
Head of Consumer Protection
24 March 2004
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