Day 127 - 23 May 95 - Page 15
1 what I would like to know first, if you can tell us, is
2 what had been the health and safety structure of the
3 Company up to the time when you were appointed as Hygiene
4 and Safety Officer?
5 A. Up until then health and safety was an integral part of
6 the Personnel Department. They co-ordinated all the work
7 on safety. It has been part of what I was trained in when
8 I was a Restaurant Manager, and there was information but
9 it was all provided by the Personnel Department.
10
11 Q. Did they have any kind of supervisory group or committee
12 looking specifically or responsible specifically for health
13 and safety questions?
14 A. Yes, the health and safety task force was set up,
15 I believe, a couple of years before I came into my role,
16 and that included people from the Personnel Department but
17 other disciplines as well, including representation from
18 our Operations people, Security, Purchasing, Marketing --
19 anybody who would have an interest in safety. Their role
20 was mainly to, if we had any serious accidents, to look at
21 those and see what could be learnt from those accidents and
22 to communicate to restaurants if any changes needed to
23 occur.
24
25 Q. Can I , jumping ahead a bit but it may help us understand
26 the structure, how many categories of accidents are
27 recognised within McDonald's, in grades of seriousness I am
28 talking about?
29 A. We generally refer to them with regard to the RIDDOR
30 regulations, the Reportable -- the Reporting of Injuries
31 and Dangerous Occurrence Regulations.
32
33 Q. Sorry, speak up, please.
34 A. Sorry, the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and
35 Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1985, which divide the
36 categories up into fatalities and major injuries and
37 injuries that cause employees to be off for three days or
38 more. We call those reportable ones. Anything else is
39 non-reportable, but we would expect all accidents to be
40 recorded in the accident books in the restaurants.
41
42 Q. Of the accidents below the reportables or RIDDOR accidents,
43 yes, there is another lot -- we will come to numbers later
44 on -- do you subdivide that remainder in any way in your
45 own minds?
46 A. Well, they are all divided into type of accidents as
47 well, slips and falls and handling accidents, and these
48 again though were based on the categories that we used for
49 RIDDOR, so that we keep a consistent structure throughout.
50
51 Q. We know that the Company keeps a record of the reportable
52 accidents, yes, as you have supplied us with some
53 statistics, does the Company keep -- centrally, I mean --
54 statistics for the non-reportable accidents?
55 A. No, we only keep them for centrally for the RIDDOR
56 ones, but we expect each restaurant to monitor trends in
57 their own accident book and this is audited by our auditing
58 procedures as well to make sure that they do ------
59
60 Q. Auditing procedures, what are they?
