Day 302 - 18 Nov 96 - Page 31


     
     1        If you remember, we referred to the McDonald's crew
     2        training programme.  I think it was Helen that referred to
     3        the point which said the question -- it was a series of
     4        questions, and one of them says:  "When do you use
     5        hustle?"  And the answer for all crew members, the correct
     6        answer was for all crew members to reply: "All the time."
     7        Which, considering the electrical equipment and the hot
     8        surfaces, is extremely irresponsible, to actually teach
     9        people such unsafe practices.
    10
    11        I think the main other -- I mean, I will not go into the
    12        Health and Safety Executive report, because it was looked
    13        at in quite some detail and I am trying to save time,
    14        basically.  But I think another important aspect of it,
    15        apart from hustle, was the fact that the company had no
    16        monitoring procedures and no safety culture in general, no
    17        management level safety culture procedures, monitoring
    18        awareness, and I have not got the document on me, but the
    19        Gill Barns document, the minutes of the Health and Safety
    20        Group meetings that she set up that were new to the
    21        company, included -- I have not got them here -- included
    22        references to scores out of a hundred that the company
    23        would get for its health and safety awareness and
    24        procedures, and it was something like -- I can't remember
    25        now, something like 14 percent up to after that report was
    26        produced and then it dramatically rose once they started
    27        having to take safety seriously.
    28
    29        We say they took safety seriously, or began to appear to
    30        take safety seriously, because of the double challenge over
    31        the death of Mark Hopkins and also the Health and Safety
    32        Executive report.
    33
    34        The one further thing about the Health and Safety Executive
    35        report is McDonald's have characterised this as some kind
    36        of benevolent act on their part to allow this HSE
    37        investigation, but if you remember from the evidence -- and
    38        I cannot remember the references now -- who we asked about
    39        it, it may have been Gill Barns, I think -- the recognition
    40        was that there were a lot of concerns from local
    41        environmental health and safety officers around the country
    42        who were making a number of recommendations about local
    43        stores and it was felt that one way of dealing with this in
    44        a more efficient way was to have a national investigation.
    45        So they were already under the spotlight, but on a sort of
    46        patchwork hit and miss -----
    47
    48   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  The trouble is, they were not under the
    49        spotlight.  There was the occasional beam here and there.
    50
    51   MR. MORRIS:   Right.  It was -----
    52
    53   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  Anyway, I have your point.
    54
    55   MR. MORRIS:   Yes.  It was a focus, the national investigation
    56        was a way of focusing what was happening already in a
    57        patchy way on a local level.  That is what I am trying to
    58        say.
    59
    60        Obviously, all our witnesses' statements and testimony

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