Day 127 - 23 May 95 - Page 47
1 The three together mean that it is an important part of
2 your business.
3
4 Q. Do you see any conflict or tension between those three
5 considerations so far as are you concerned?
6 A. There is no conflict at all. They all work together.
7
8 Q. However much it may cost in pounds, shillings and pence to
9 achieve what you are seeking?
10 A. Well, there is a balance there, in that in spending
11 money on safety you save money on the other side of it,
12 accidents and damage. So, of course, you would not throw
13 thousands of pounds at something that would be very low
14 risk, but you would spend a lot of money at things that are
15 higher risk. Again it comes back to this balancing and
16 what is reasonably practical.
17
18 Q. This is something we will come back to in a little more
19 detail later on, but given that your company runs a
20 fast-food business which is work intensive at the bottom
21 end in the restaurant, do you realistically believe that
22 there is any way in which you can actually prevent
23 accidents, burns, cuts, trips from happening at all?
24 A. It would be a nice idea to say that one day we could
25 prevent all accidents completely, but in the real world it
26 is just not going to happen. Our aim is preventing the
27 more serious accidents; certainly that will have an
28 knock-on effect in preventing some of the minor ones as
29 well, but it would just be a practical impossibility. Just
30 think of yourselves at home, how many times at home do you
31 cut your finger with a knife or burn yourself and so
32 forth? It is just a fact of being a human being I am
33 afraid.
34
35 Q. If you look at the bottom part of this page 156 you see
36 that the Americans have classified accidents in the
37 restaurants by different kinds of accidents, different
38 causes of accidents, different places, so on and so forth,
39 do you see that, and also by severity?
40 A. Yes.
41
42 Q. Are you able to do that kind of classification with the
43 information you have got in this country, do you think?
44 A. We would be able to do that. I seem to remember quite
45 a long time ago I did have a go at comparing. There is no
46 doubt that ours would come out slightly differently,
47 particularly in terms of the severity because, as
48 I understand this, this includes total loss, so it is
49 injury as well as the costs side. As I said before, ours
50 really would be focused more on the degree of injury
51 because the cost side in terms of claim is a lot less. So
52 I would expect our severities to be different. Yes,
53 I would expect the frequencies to be slightly different as
54 well. It is the other side of the world; you would not
55 expect them to be exactly the same.
56
57 Q. Then if you would like to there -- is nothing else I want
58 to ask you about in this section. One sees the section on
59 safety (it includes fire precautions) runs through to page
60 172 of the file. Can you put that file away, please, and
