Day 181 - 01 Nov 95 - Page 43
1 I am waiting for a question.
2
3 MR. RAMPTON: I know. That is not my fault.
4
5 MR. JUSTICE BELL: You are waiting for a question, because
6 I interrupted Mr. Rampton. That is the reason. Yes,
7 Mr. Rampton. Page 106.
8
9 MR. RAMPTON: Let us skip page 106, if we may, Mr. Pearson, and
10 go straight to 108, "distribution hotels and catering
11 repairs". For that category, which includes hotels and
12 catering, the reported serious accidents, including
13 fatalities -- injuries, sorry -- are 395 per 100,000, or
14 39.5 per 1,000?
15 A. Yes. It is something around -- yes, it is something
16 around just over half of the national average, if you like,
17 of all industries shown at the bottom of the page. I think
18 my concern on the health and safety front, health and
19 safety work has always been an area of particular concern
20 and interest to me, particularly during my time as a trade
21 union official for 11 years, because the brief point is
22 this, that it is not so much in the catering trade, it is
23 the deaths and the serious injuries -- though of course
24 they feature -- it is the less serious but not minor
25 injuries that concern me.
26
27 When you referred earlier to my visits to the two
28 restaurants, I did see the accident books for those units,
29 although I did ask and was not provided with a copy of the
30 accident schedules. But what I recall from the accident
31 books was a run of really not reportable injuries. This is
32 the characteristic of the catering industry that is not
33 reflected in these statistics.
34
35 It is, however -- the point about the industry is that it
36 is a risky industry, and it is risky because of the
37 pressures of work; and in the catering area, and
38 particularly we are talking about kitchens and so forth,
39 you have got various problems to deal with: you have wet
40 floors, you have hot surfaces, you have crowding, you have
41 sharp instruments; and the injuries you would get would
42 tend to be non-fatal, and they would tend to be not
43 reported and not appear in these statistics.
44
45 Q. Non-fatal -- I mean, broken bones, time in hospitals, three
46 days off work. I am trying to summarise it.
47 A. It is a cuts and burns industry.
48
49 Q. Yes, exactly.
50 A. It is cuts and burns. It is a fracture, it is a fall
51 industry.
52
53 Q. Fractures are reportable?
54 A. Yes, yes, absolutely.
55
56 Q. No, we are not dealing with those. It is a very low rate
57 here. Making all due allowance, as I say, for
58 under-reporting, hotels and catering is less than half the
59 total for the service industry generally, or the service
60 industries generally, is it not?
