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
