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
