Day 130 - 26 May 95 - Page 49
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2 Q. How long have restaurant management had to go through this
3 basic health and safety one-day course?
4 A. Well, as I said earlier, I think it is something we
5 introduced after the HSE assessment because we had
6 introduced the basic hygiene one first, so that would make
7 it 1992 or possibly 1993.
8
9 Q. I am just going through your evidence-in-chief here, going
10 back to -- I am sorry to dodge about all over the place.
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12 MR. JUSTICE BELL: That does not matter. If you just give in
13 three words what the topic is you are coming to, then it
14 gives everyone a chance to move their minds across to it.
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16 MR. MORRIS: Just going back to the accident statistics, you
17 said that the accident book should be filled in. Then you
18 said the more accident data you can gather locally, the
19 better information it gives you about trends; "It is not
20 something we feel we can do corporately because every
21 restaurant is laid out slightly differently". That,
22 Mrs. Barnes, is a load of rubbish is it not? You are quite
23 capable of compiling national statistics, if you thought it
24 was important, based upon accidents books?
25 A. I think you have to look here in terms of benefits
26 versus effort. Certainly looking at the Colchester book
27 this morning, many of the accidents there would have been
28 specific to that restaurant. With many of them there was
29 nothing that we could have learnt from them Company-wide.
30 I am not saying we could not improve what we do at the
31 moment. As I say, our intention is to start making records
32 of lost time accidents, but unless we investigate them,
33 unless we look into them and identify the causes, really
34 the statistics themselves are not an awful lot of use to
35 us. That is what we want to go on as the next stage.
36
37 As I said yesterday, my ideal would be to have a
38 computerised accidents book. Yes, we could collate all the
39 information but, as you see for yourself from the
40 Colchester book, that is only ever as good as the amount of
41 people following that system, or using that book, or
42 putting in the information. That is why it is really
43 important that we have other proactive measures to see how
44 we are doing with regard to safety.
45
46 Q. I think, with respect to Mrs. Barnes, that there is quite a
47 lot of information that we could glean from that accident
48 book, and ones that were more extensively kept as well, and
49 if you do not compile national statistics, it is because
50 you do not want to learn the lessons that are there to be
51 learnt.
52 A. Again, that is absolute rubbish. In terms of it is my
53 decision as Hygiene and Safety Manager to decide the amount
54 of effort we put into gathering the statistics versus other
55 proactive measurements, such as unannounced visits to
56 stores, actually monitoring whether people are working
57 safely, and that is just not saying to them: "Are you
58 working safely?" but monitoring key activities to see they
59 are doing them. That is what we do.
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