Robens report: 50 years on

The 1972 Robens report and the organisations it gave birth to transformed health and safety in Britain and has shown remarkable adaptability even half a century later.

July 2022 marks 50 years since the Robens committee, led by Lord Alfred Robens, published its landmark report, transforming Britain’s regulatory OSH approach and creating a ripple effect felt as far away as Singapore and Australia.

The report, Safety and health at work: report of the committee 1970-1972 (Robens et al, 1972), outlined a series of recommendations aimed at overhauling the nation’s fragmented and overly prescriptive OSH regime.

Accidents and fatalities at work by 1970 were unacceptably high and the UK regulatory system wasn’t working. One of several catalysts for change was the Aberfan disaster on 21 October 1966 when 144 people – 116 of them children – were killed by a tip of coal waste sliding onto their South Wales village.

The tribunal that was later held into the disaster concluded: ‘Blame for the disaster rests upon the National Coal Board’ (Aberfan Tribunal, 1967) – the same coal board that Lord Robens was chairman of when the disaster occurred.

While his conduct at the time of the disaster and his ultimate appointment to the committee has drawn criticism over the years, the committee’s work was a success, underpinning the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 (HSWA) (The British Academy, 2016). It was the committee’s recommendation to change the nation’s fragmented and overly prescriptive OSH regime with a more flexible system that emphasised what Robens termed ‘self-regulation’. The new regime also extended OSH protections to a greater number of workers and, for the first time, the public. The committee’s recommendations were substantively enacted in the HSWA, which received royal assent in July 1974, exactly two years after the Robens report was published.

This pivotal legislation created two new bodies: an independent, tripartite Health and Safety Commission (HSC), and the GB Health and Safety Executive (HSE), a regulator enforcing health and safety legislation in workplaces, except for those regulated by local authorities.

The HSWA also promoted the idea of health and safety as integral to good management, introducing codes of practice and general duties to reduce risks ‘so far as reasonably practicable’ (Almond et al, 2016).

Better standards

Traditional heavy industries played a major role in the British economy in the early 1970s, radically different to the UK’s service-based and increasingly digital economy of today. Even so, there is a strong case to be made that the HSWA and the Robens philosophy that underpinned it have brought about tangible improvements in Britain’s safety record up to the present day.

Kevin Myers, who started his HSE career as a factory inspector in 1976 and rose to become the body’s deputy chief executive, certainly believes so.

‘Fifty years on, you would expect some improvements anyway because of the reduction in high-hazard industries,’ he says. ‘But does that explain the fact that there has been a 90% reduction in fatal accidents over that period? The evidence suggests not, and that a significant percentage of those improvements reflect better standards.

‘However, 142 GB workers had fatal accidents in 2020-21 [HSE, 2021a], so there’s no room for complacency.’

Kevin is part of an informal project team whose remit includes exploring the impact the Robens report has had on OSH over the past five decades – a project initiated by Kevin and his colleagues, who have invited IOSH and other organisations to collaborate and help shape it.

Anniversary project

The Robens report is the first of three 50-year anniversaries coming up in quick succession. The HSWA reaches that milestone on 31 July 2024, and January 2025 marks the anniversary of the creation of the HSE. Then there is the OSH system that emerged, evolved and developed on the back of these three landmark events.

As part of their project, Kevin and other former HSE colleagues, including past directors and executives David Snowball, David Ashton and David Eves, are putting the final touches to three documents to coincide with the Robens anniversary.

The first is an essay by David Ashton that considers why in May 1970 Barbara Castle, secretary of state for employment and productivity, chose Lord Robens to undertake the first-ever comprehensive review of Britain’s regulatory OSH system. The second looks at how and why specific report recommendations were or were not implemented. The final document will explore whether the Robens philosophy has made a difference, given that our world of work is so different from that of 1972.

‘This is not some nostalgic look backwards,’ explains Kevin. ‘It’s to see whether there are things we can learn from the past to help us address some of the current and future challenges. The 50th anniversary provides that opportunity.’

The essay is a logical starting point as it reminds readers why a rethink of the OSH system was required in 1970 and why and how the committee reached its conclusions.

Historian Christopher Sirrs has also thrown light on this. In an article for the journal Social History of Medicine (2016), he noted that nine acts and more than 500 regulations governed the safety, health and welfare of workers before the HSWA took effect. This prompted the Robens committee to conclude that regulation had become overly detailed and was promoting apathy in industrial circles.

Some workplaces were subject to conflicting requirements while others had no legal coverage, Christopher adds. Almost a third of the British workforce received no statutory protection from work-related accidents or illness (Sirrs, 2015).

One of the committee’s main conclusions was that overall responsibility for managing OSH should clearly sit with employers – who create the risks in the first place – working in partnership with their employees.

Measured debate

David Ashton’s essay is important in this respect because it provides valuable material for more informed discussions about what Robens said in the report – particularly in relation to references that drew criticism at the time and have done ever since.

‘There are misconceptions, one of the most persistent being what he meant by self-regulation,’ explains David. ‘This has been interpreted as “Get the regulator (and their burdensome regulations) out of the way, encourage and allow businesses to regulate themselves and all will be well.” But that’s not actually what he said.’

Jenny Bacon, who was in charge of the team at the Department of Employment and Productivity that implemented the Robens report, and later the HSE’s first female director general, says the onus on self-regulation was about asking those responsible for managing risks to identify them and set out how they would manage them effectively. This, she says, was a game-changer. ‘If you want to put the onus on industry, then you’ve got to have a common approach to risk assessment and prevention,’ she says.

Sound philosophy

This philosophy has served the OSH regime well and Kevin feels it is as valid today as it was back then. He points to the reports of Lord Young (2010) and Professor Ragnar Löfstedt (2011), and the HSE’s triennial reviews and periodic regulatory reviews, and argues they have all concluded that Robens’ basic design principle is absolutely sound.

‘One of the things we want to do in this project is explore: “Why does the HSE still exist?” It has stood the test of time because it was established on a premise of what people would recognise now in a broader context of better regulation,’ Kevin says.

IOSH’s first female president Daphne Linton (1996-97) was a factory inspector when the HSWA came into force. She remembers how it redefined approaches to safety.

‘Instead of looking for breaches of a code of regulations, we started to look at how organisations assessed their risk and what could be done to reduce them,’ she says.

Sheila Pantry OBE, head of the HSE’s information services in the 1970s and author of the History of Occupational Safety and Health website, says the creation of the HSE as a single, unified regulator was a ground-breaking move.

The problem with having so many different inspectorates was that it could often lead to piecemeal and sometimes conflicting enforcement, she says.

David Snowball concurs. Rereading the Robens report, he was reminded of how critical its author was of some of the inspectorates, how they worked and their efforts to reduce risk.

‘That was a hugely brave thing to recommend, to bring all these potentially warring inspectorates together,’ he says. ‘Robens is quite brutal in places about the extent to which he thought traditional face-to-face intervention had any real lasting impact on overall standards and outcomes.’

Kevin argues that one of the defining differences between the old regime and Robens’ regulatory system is that the latter is based on ‘adult-adult’ relationship between the regulator and the regulated, rather than an ‘adult-child’ one.

‘That’s very different from a command-and-control approach centred on compliance with prescriptive rules,’ he says. ‘At the end of the day, it is about how the people who create and manage risk step up to discharge that adult responsibility.’

Real responsibility

Looking back over Robens’ legacy, David Snowball argues that one of the long-term success stories is how individual sectors, such as the oil and gas industry, have had to take greater ownership and responsibility for improvements after major disasters, such as Piper Alpha in 1988, in ways that also require an independent regulator to target its own efforts more effectively.

Kevin points to the OSH profession’s enhanced profile over the past 50 years and the significant contribution it made to overall improvements, albeit when the relationship within industry works well. ‘Sometimes, however, that relationship can also become adult-child,’ he explains. ‘We as regulators need to influence people’s behaviour and convince others to take the responsibility for OSH. OSH professionals that are not regulators have a similar challenge.’

Daphne agrees, saying soft skills are almost more important than technical expertise. ‘Getting on a good footing with people and getting them to talk and tell you what’s happening is very important,’ she adds.

One of the challenges of looking back over 50 years is the fact that the statistics aren’t always comparable. Although the figures for fatalities fell – from 651 in 1974 to 142 in 2020-21 – health has been a much harder nut to both measure and crack (HSE, 2021b).

Robens abroad

Malcolm McIntyre CFIOSH, former global health and safety audit manager at Bovis Lend Lease, says it was Robens who brought health to the forefront.

‘It took a while to get going, but it has grown and we now place a huge emphasis on health in construction projects,’ he says. ‘Post-Robens, health started to mean something. Before that we never talked about guys sweeping the floor creating silica dust and needing to wear eye and face protection.’

Aside from its enduring legacy in the UK, Robens’ risk-based approach has also gained traction overseas, including in Australia and Singapore.

mental health, AI and cyber risk are the main challenges of the future

When Australia first adopted the Robens’ risk-based approach, it was introduced through the country’s six states and two territories.

This led to calls from industry for a more consistent approach, and in 2011 Safe Work Australia developed a single set of work health and safety laws. They also took the opportunity to update the Robens approach to reflect contemporary challenges, such as the gig economy.

‘Companies like Uber will now have a responsibility under the Australian law for drivers that are allegedly all independent subcontractors, but in everyday terms work for them,’ says Kevin. He argues the OSH regime is flexible enough to adapt well to a changing world and that the UK could take a leaf out of Australia’s book by amending the drafting of the HSWA so the responsibilities for managing risk in the gig economy are more explicit.

Singapore is also an interesting case as it adopted Robens’ risk-based system through the creation of the Workplace Safety and Health Council (see Singapore, page 34).

Safety culture

Reflecting on her international work, Daphne says that, ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the regulatory system is or what country you are operating in. ‘If you’ve got a good factory manager and a company that supports them, you’ll have a good factory. If you’ve got a factory manager who isn’t at all interested in health and safety, you’ll have a poor one.’

Kevin concurs. ‘No matter how effective you are as a regulator, if the people that control and manage risks don’t respond to that, you won’t have the improvements that are needed.’

Looking to the next 50 years, David Snowball feels the OSH agenda is getting more complicated, and cites mental health, artificial intelligence and cyber risk as some of the main challenges.

Like his colleagues, David Ashton believes the UK’s OSH regime is still fit for purpose. However, he echoes the Robens report’s closing remarks about needing to sustain interest and initiative. ‘Yes, we need them both – but there is a danger of moving from the apathy he criticised in the 1970s to “indigestion” now,’ he warns.

‘People think, “I really do get this health and safety thing and I really want to have the right standards, but it seems indigestible when you are tied up in written risk assessments”. I’m not saying [they] are right, but that is a view that is quite widely expressed and manifests itself through fairly clumsily designed deregulatory initiatives,’ David adds.

For Peter Brown, the HSE’s director of engagement and policy, the Robens report remains a defining moment not only in the HSE’s evolution, but also in Britain’s workplace culture.

‘Our economy and our workplaces may have changed dramatically in the past 50 years,’ he says, ‘but the same principle that all workers should be able to go home safe and well still stands and lies at the heart of the work HSE does and will guide us through the next 50 years.’

To listen to the HSE’s Philip White and Peter Brown talk about the Robens report, go to ioshmagazine.com/2021/11/04/hse-podcast

Image credit | Alamy | iStock