Day 130 - 26 May 95 - Page 50


     
     1   Q.   You do not even include safety monitoring in your OCLs in
     2        terms of practice at work; you only ask questions to see if
     3        employees can provide the right answer.
     4
     5   MR. RAMPTON:  This is the second time this assertion has been
     6        made.  It arises (as ever) out of the failure to read the
     7        documents.  I do not know whether your Lordship would like
     8        me to come back to it in re-examination?
     9
    10   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  I would take it up in re-examination, if you
    11        feel you need to, at the end of the day, Mr. Rampton.
    12        A.  I would like to make a point about working safely, in
    13        that what is safe to Mr. Morris and what is safe to me, and
    14        what is safe to a new crew member can be completely
    15        different things, depending on that background.  That is
    16        why it is just not good enough to put into an OCL:  "Are
    17        they working safely?" or "You should work safely".  That
    18        means nothing to them.  You have to teach them the
    19        specifics of that means on any particular station.  So, for
    20        example, with filtering it means, in part, wearing
    21        protective equipment.  That is what you monitor.
    22
    23   MR. MORRIS:  The reality is your Department is actually -- the
    24        kind of department that would want to, presumably, do this
    25        national monitoring -- totally under-staffed and
    26        under-funded, so that you could not even do that work, if
    27        you wanted to?
    28        A.  Look, the responsibility with regard to the safety of
    29        our employees rests (and anybody from Operations would go
    30        along with me) rests with the Operations people and the
    31        people that are running the restaurants.  I cannot
    32        legislate, sitting in an office, what happens in one of our
    33        600 stores.  We can give them advice, we can give them
    34        help.  All of my people have Operations background.  They
    35        know exactly what happens in the restaurants, but we have
    36        to be able to prepare those restaurant managers to look for
    37        themselves in their own particular restaurants, and manage
    38        safety for themselves, to get their employees involved, to
    39        have safety circles.  I cannot do that for them.  All it
    40        would mean, if I had an enormous department, is that people
    41        would start saying:  "Oh, well, it is Jill Barnes's
    42        responsibility to look after safety" which is not what it
    43        is about at all.  We recognise that rests with our
    44        restaurant management.
    45
    46   Q.   Yes, and because they were not up to task, your Department
    47        was set up, is that not the case, to do a better job?
    48        A.  Well, no.  My department was set up because of a
    49        newer approach to legislation which they felt needed a
    50        little more intellectual application than had been required 
    51        before, but safety is always a part of what  our personnel 
    52        department monitored.  It has always been part of our 
    53        Operations.  It has been taught on our basic Operation
    54        courses.  It is not something new.  It is just as the
    55        Company has expanded, we have managed it differently.
    56
    57   Q.   You see, I would have thought it is common sense that the
    58        one thing your department can do is to look at statistics,
    59        national statistics, monitoring the situation, and you,
    60        yourself, have said that you have these RIDDOR accidents,

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