Research Note Problems in Monitoring the Safety Performance of British Manufacturing at the End of the Twentieth Century

I have frequently expressed the view that the statistics for over three day injuries cannot be relied upon for the sort of temporal research on safety in which I have recently been engaged, for instance concerning the effectiveness of the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act (Nichols, 1989a; 1990). It has been suggested in the context of some related research (Nichols, 1989b; 1991a) that the over three day injury rate may actually be a useful indicator of safety in some respects and that the fatality rate may not be (Tombs, 1992).¹ By contrast, the following short account looks to the future and considers whether, in the 1990s, a point has been reached when any official injury statistics for employees in UK manufacturing can provide satisfactory monitoring of improvements or otherwise in safety over time. First, the fatality rate is briefly discussed, then the rate for major injuries, then the rate for over three day injuries. Two other new sources of injury data are also briefly considered, the 1990 Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the 1990 Work Industrial Relations Survey (WIRS3).