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Workplace Temperatures

Clear evidence is emerging about the disparities between a unionised shop and a non-unionised one. In most employment situations—we have all been there—it is also better to have a clarity of relationship. Then the union can relate to management and say, "We've got a problem here and we will jointly resolve that problem." However, where there is a real difficulty is if there is no union organisation to do that. In that situation, therefore, the only fall-back is clear regulation and law. If the legislation is not clear, the individual is vulnerable to exploitation and they are unable to exercise their particular protections. There are real problems because we do not have clarity on a maximum temperature and those problems have emerged in this debate. There are problems about just regulating the overall workplace itself. What is happening at the moment is that, on an ad hoc basis, there are interventions by both unions and management to resolve matters, but in other areas there are no interventions and as a result employees are having to endure working in what I believe are unsafe and unhealthy working conditions. I tried to gain information about how the existing regulations are working, so I put down questions about enforcement and monitoring. I asked the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions""how many instances of stress due to exposure to high temperatures in the workplace were reported to the Health and Safety Executive"." I chose the years from 2005 to 2008 to ask about, to gain information on up-to-date records from the last four or five years. The response that I received from my hon. Friend the Minister who is here today was:""Instances of heat stress, as a medical condition, may be included in injuries reported under the Reporting of Injuries Disease and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1995 but it is not possible to identify them separately."" At the moment, therefore, the HSE is not even monitoring the separate issue of instances of heat stress. I then thought that I would at least see whether there are any examples of prosecutions, because we know from the surveys that have been carried out that high workplace temperatures are a serious issue for many workers. We have also seen from the surveys that, in some instances, workers have failed to induce action from their employers to resolve these problems. Therefore, what is the fall-back? Well, the fall-back is the HSE prosecuting employers who fail to meet the standards set out in the regulations. So I asked how many prosecutions there had been by the HSE in cases of failure to manage high temperatures in the workplace and again I asked about the years from 2005 to 2008. My hon. Friend the Minister reported:""From 1 April 2004 to 31 March 2008, the Health and Safety Executive took no prosecutions as a result of employers' failure to manage high temperatures in the workplace.""Although outside the period specified in the question"—" that is more recently—""legal proceedings have recently been initiated by HSE in relation to a workplace fatality in 2006-07 in which heat stress was implicated."—[Official Report, 23 February 2009; Vol. 488, c. 73-74W.]" Let me just remind Members that, from the surveys that were undertaken by the bakers union, the TUC and other unions, we have report after report of heat stress and its serious effects on workers' health. Yet we now discover that the HSE is not monitoring heat stress and there has not been a single prosecution during the period that I asked about, from 2005 to 2008, and only now has one prosecution been commenced.