Day 130 - 26 May 95 - Page 29


     
     1        A.  Nobody would know, apart from all crew collectively,
     2        because it is part of their responsibility to go and find
     3        the accident book and put the information in and inform the
     4        Manager.
     5
     6   Q.   But there, presumably, is a wide variation on the reporting
     7        because some may grossly under-report and some may do
     8        better than the average, in terms of reporting all their
     9        accidents, would they not?
    10        A.  Well, I do not know about a gross variation, but there
    11        certainly would be a variation, and it is one of the
    12        problems with just depending on accident statistics to
    13        measure your state of performance, because it is only as
    14        good as the people that are recording the information. It
    15        is only as good as the communication of information as
    16        well, which, obviously, the easiest way of showing a
    17        decrease in accident numbers is just to stop telling people
    18        about it.  We would like to think the culture is the other
    19        way; we encourage people to record the information, so we
    20        can monitor the trend and learn from it where we can.
    21
    22   Q.   If you can just go through this.  Have you had a flick
    23        through it?
    24        A.  I have had a flick through it, yes.
    25
    26   Q.   The kind of range of accidents and injuries that are
    27        reported here are fairly typical, are they, of any store,
    28        in your experience?
    29
    30   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  There is going to be the odd one.  I do not
    31        suppose many people fall through the roof in the men's
    32        customer toilets, for instance, but does it look fairly
    33        typical?
    34        A.  They are certainly the sorts of accidents that would
    35        happen in our restaurants, I would say, with this
    36        particular restaurant, there is nowhere near 100 accidents
    37        a year in here.
    38
    39   MR. MORRIS:  I understand that?
    40        A.  Therefore, a lot of the very minor ones were not being
    41        recorded for whatever reason.
    42
    43   Q.   Maybe some of the major ones, for all you know?
    44        A.  There is no way of telling.
    45
    46   Q.   I presume you are not saying that the accidents recorded in
    47        this book in front of us are trivial accidents?
    48        A.  No, I said the opposite.  I said the very minor ones do
    49        not seem to be being recorded in general.  The ones in
    50        here, quite a lot of them look quite concerning. 
    51 
    52   Q.   The first one, for example, is a suspected fracture of the 
    53        left wrist.
    54        A.  You know, obviously going back to 1984, it is six years
    55        before I was appointed.  There was no way I would know
    56        about the specifics of any of these.
    57
    58   Q.   I understand that.
    59        A.  What I would have expected would be the management to
    60        have investigated it locally at the time, perhaps not

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