Day 130 - 26 May 95 - Page 50
1 Q. You do not even include safety monitoring in your OCLs in
2 terms of practice at work; you only ask questions to see if
3 employees can provide the right answer.
4
5 MR. RAMPTON: This is the second time this assertion has been
6 made. It arises (as ever) out of the failure to read the
7 documents. I do not know whether your Lordship would like
8 me to come back to it in re-examination?
9
10 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I would take it up in re-examination, if you
11 feel you need to, at the end of the day, Mr. Rampton.
12 A. I would like to make a point about working safely, in
13 that what is safe to Mr. Morris and what is safe to me, and
14 what is safe to a new crew member can be completely
15 different things, depending on that background. That is
16 why it is just not good enough to put into an OCL: "Are
17 they working safely?" or "You should work safely". That
18 means nothing to them. You have to teach them the
19 specifics of that means on any particular station. So, for
20 example, with filtering it means, in part, wearing
21 protective equipment. That is what you monitor.
22
23 MR. MORRIS: The reality is your Department is actually -- the
24 kind of department that would want to, presumably, do this
25 national monitoring -- totally under-staffed and
26 under-funded, so that you could not even do that work, if
27 you wanted to?
28 A. Look, the responsibility with regard to the safety of
29 our employees rests (and anybody from Operations would go
30 along with me) rests with the Operations people and the
31 people that are running the restaurants. I cannot
32 legislate, sitting in an office, what happens in one of our
33 600 stores. We can give them advice, we can give them
34 help. All of my people have Operations background. They
35 know exactly what happens in the restaurants, but we have
36 to be able to prepare those restaurant managers to look for
37 themselves in their own particular restaurants, and manage
38 safety for themselves, to get their employees involved, to
39 have safety circles. I cannot do that for them. All it
40 would mean, if I had an enormous department, is that people
41 would start saying: "Oh, well, it is Jill Barnes's
42 responsibility to look after safety" which is not what it
43 is about at all. We recognise that rests with our
44 restaurant management.
45
46 Q. Yes, and because they were not up to task, your Department
47 was set up, is that not the case, to do a better job?
48 A. Well, no. My department was set up because of a
49 newer approach to legislation which they felt needed a
50 little more intellectual application than had been required
51 before, but safety is always a part of what our personnel
52 department monitored. It has always been part of our
53 Operations. It has been taught on our basic Operation
54 courses. It is not something new. It is just as the
55 Company has expanded, we have managed it differently.
56
57 Q. You see, I would have thought it is common sense that the
58 one thing your department can do is to look at statistics,
59 national statistics, monitoring the situation, and you,
60 yourself, have said that you have these RIDDOR accidents,
