Chamber and committees

My final question is probably for Amy Knighton and Murray Smith again. In your respective roles as members and representatives of your royal colleges, given that you are front-line primary care providers, are you concerned for your fellow workers in this space?

You have talked about additional pressure and not being able to do what you want to do because you do not have the time, the capacity or the resource. Are we not paying enough attention to the consequential impact of that? If any of you or your colleagues are not there, that only exacerbates the problem for everybody else. Are we missing that important aspect? Perhaps Amy Knighton can answer that.

On Sunday, on a rather wet and chilly afternoon, many of us gathered at Persley walled garden in Woodside, in Aberdeen, just up from the River Don, at the workers memorial. We were there, as people are every year on 28 April, to mark international workers memorial day. We gather as workers and trade unionists to remember those who have lost their lives at work and those who are still fighting for safer conditions, better pay and improved representation in their workplaces.

It is fitting, then, that this evening we come together to mark the 1974 legislation, which underpins the legal requirements around workers’ health, safety and welfare. I thank Bill Kidd for securing the debate and I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests—I am a member of Unite the union.

Fifty years on, much has changed. As the motion outlines, the legislation has saved lives, and we will probably never know who is still alive today because of that legislation or which children still have a mother or a father because they were not killed at work. We cannot measure the scale or importance of those laws. However, too many workers are still killed at work. Since 1974, we have seen some awful tragedies unfold in which workers were killed or injured because their bosses chose to cut corners or to prioritise profits over the health and wellbeing of their workers.

In 1988, a fire that might have subsided or been put out resulted in a deadly explosion that killed 165 of the 226 workers on the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea. Two crewmen from an emergency rescue boat also lost their lives. Those deaths were preventable. Workers on two nearby platforms—Claymore and Tartan—which pumped to Piper Alpha, could see that the platform that they were pumping to was alight, but they had been told never to shut off the oil and gas that they pumped, even to a burning platform. That order caused the deaths of 167 people, all because oil bosses could see no circumstance in which it would be appropriate to stop pumping. The Piper Alpha disaster led to a transformation in how the oil and gas industry treated the safety of its North Sea installations, but such a transformation should never have come at such a cost.

This year, the theme for international workers memorial day was the climate crisis and workers’ health. We can all appreciate the impacts of climate change on occupational health and safety. A substantial body of evidence shows how extreme weather events, which are increasing in number as a consequence of climate change, exacerbate occupational risks. Heat stress, ultraviolet radiation, air pollution and increased exposure to chemicals are just some of the risks to which more and more workers are exposed more often.

Like Bill Kidd, I recognise the work of the Fire Brigades Union in highlighting the dangers that firefighters face when having to deal with more prevalent and more severe wildfires or when being exposed to carcinogenic chemicals in the course of their daily work. I applaud its DECON campaign, which seeks to raise awareness of the risks relating to the profession and to secure improved training, processes and resources to keep firefighters as safe as possible while they work to save our lives.

There are so many other issues that I wanted to raise, from the mental ill health and stress that are caused by lack of resources to undertake roles to exposure to asbestos or unsafe reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete. Although the legislation of 50 years ago has saved lives, it is clear that, across so many different sectors, we still have much work to do to secure the health, safety and wellbeing of all our workers. We remember the dead and we continue to fight for the living.

Good morning panel, and thank you for your contributions so far today, and previously in writing. I will explore a couple of issues around support for marginalised and minoritised groups and how the strategy deals with those. I have a couple of general questions to ask, first.

Is there enough information in the strategy to identify particularly vulnerable groups, or is that a problematic way of viewing the issue in the first place? Given what we know about increases, not only in suicide but in suicidal ideation, in specific groups, does the strategy get to grips with that enough?

Rebecca Hoffman mentioned that issue in her opening remarks. Do you want to come in first?

Rebecca, I will come back to you.

Dan Farthing mentioned asylum seekers. You will be aware of the work on asylum seekers that the committee did last year, in which suicide and suicidal ideation came up. You spoke about learning lessons. In many cases, we know what we need to do and just need to get on with it. Do we have the right structures in place? Resource is one thing, but we must also get the resources to the right people—front-line support workers and people beyond them. I am thinking particularly of the vulnerable group of asylum seekers. There are many strings attached to local, Scottish and UK Government agencies, which cut across each other in various ways.

That is really helpful. Rebecca, do you want to come in?

One thing that I picked up from that is the need to retain an intersectional understanding when we use focus groups, because people can fit into more than one group.

Neil—I come to you with the same general question. When we think about particularly vulnerable groups or individuals, are there any gaps in the strategy?

Thank you for raising NES. It provides some fantastic resources, so the issue is getting those out to the right people.

I will look out for that report in May.

Dan Farthing, I will come to you on the same question. Are there issues that the strategy does not get at when it comes to particularly vulnerable groups?

I am wondering whether we also need to think about cross-departmental education, training and support. Do people who are supporting prisoners after their release have that training? Can they access exactly the same training that already exists? Let us not reinvent the wheel multiple times across Government.