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Health and Safety (Offences) Bill

In the last weekend of Easter, there is always a very moving ceremony outside the Minster in Rotherham, the parish church, at which the vicar of Rotherham—together, usually, with a Muslim imam—gathers with workers and trade unionists to lay wreaths to commemorate all the people who died in workplace accidents in the past year in Britain. Workers’ memorial day has grown from being a very small event into quite a large gathering. The Bill of my right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Keith Hill), which is achieving its Third Reading with all-party support, will be warmly welcomed by employees and workers in Rotherham. I am of course conscious that my right hon. Friend has a distinguished trade union background, serving the railway workers of Britain in particular before entering this House. It worries me slightly that the same number of people with such background and experience are no longer to be seen on the Benches of either side of this House. It is important that the difficulties that employees and workers face be adequately reflected in this our House of Commons. As the MP for Rotherham—for that great steel, engineering and mining town—I am of course extremely conscious of the devastating toll that workplace accidents still take on the lives of people in my constituency and in the whole of south Yorkshire. I could regale you with stories of some of the major workplace accidents that have taken place in Rotherham, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but I suspect that you would not allow me to do so. I strongly commend a marvellous new book called ““Black Gold””, which is about the Fitzwilliam family, who owned much of the land and the mines of Rotherham. They were actually a very progressive and socially conscious family. On a visit to Rotherham, King George V became the first monarch ever to descend down a mine. Everything was set up and carefully prepared for him. A day or two before that happened, there was a terrible mining accident, which shocked the whole community, but the King still went to greet the miners. I think that he understood from that moment some of the real difficulties faced by working people in Britain, of which the Governments of the day, whose representatives came principally only from what one might call the bourgeois, employer or capitalist class, had no idea. It is important that the House acknowledges that far too many people still die or are seriously injured at work in our country—according to the latest available figures, 241 people were killed and 28,267 were injured in the workplace in 2006-07. That death toll is extraordinary. We rightly draw to the House’s attention the death of any one of our public servants—our brave military in Afghanistan, our police officers or our fire officers—when they give up their lives for us in the course of their duty, but we rarely hear mention at the Dispatch Box of anyone who has lost their life simply because we are not able to alter our mentality to prevent preventable accidents. The Bill promoted by my right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham is an important step forward in that direction. I shall not adumbrate the Government’s efforts in the past 11 years to help the working people of Britain, which started with the minimum wage and the signing of the social chapter, and continued with last week’s agreement, thanks to a good example of working social partnership between the CBI and the TUC, on the agency workers question. It was endorsed by the European Council after 15 hours of long negotiation by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Minister for Employment Relations and Postal Affairs. I was disappointed to hear the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly) attack that deal, saying that it was about a Government getting on the backs of employers. The hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), all of whose contributions to this debate I have read carefully, has been very supportive of the Bill promoted by my right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham and of the Government’s support for it. We need to place on record the fact that were there to be a change of Government, the workers of Britain would need to watch out—we have already heard the language of withdrawing from the social charter obligations of Europe and altering the strike law in this country. There is no doubt that the men of immense wealth who sit in the shadow Cabinet and represent the Conservative party have no real care for the broader interests of Britain’s working people. The hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire is put up to support this Bill, and we welcome his presence, although he is, of course, alone in the House with a string of Labour MPs.