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• 13 May 2009
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Workplace Health and Safety Council

Meeting Minutes - No.8, Wednesday 13 May 2009

PRESENT Christopher Blake (Chair) Helen Kelly, Phil O’Reilly, Andrew Casidy, Paul Jarvie and Hon Kate Wilkinson for item 8.4.

IN ATTENDANCE

• Craig Armitage (DoL), Ray Campbell (ACC), Leonie Hall (DoL), Frances Lane Brooker (DoL), Katie Sadleir (ACC), Geoff Wilson (ACC), Jim Murphy (DoL), Geraint Emrys (DoL).
• Kathy Drysdale and Kelly Hanson-White for item 8.7, Colin Meehan (Private Secretary Labour) for item 8.4.

APOLOGIES Panu Raea, Hon Pansy Wong, and Maarten Quivooy (DoL).

INTRODUCTION

The meeting commenced at 9.00 am with brief introductions from attendees.

The Minister of Labour, Hon Kate Wilkinson, joined the meeting from 9.00am-9.30am.

ACTION

The Council:

8.1     Noted apologies.

8.2       Confirmed the minutes of the 9 April 2009 meeting with one amendment.

8.3     Agreed the summary of actions.

Item 8.4:  Business/Industry CE’s leadership forum report back

Christopher Blake reported back on the CE’s leadership forum, describing it as an opportunity for senior executives to come together to focus on health and safety in the workplace – where leadership is clearly a critical element.

40 CE’s attended, and another meeting is scheduled in a month – the intention is to communicate the action points from the meeting.

The Minister also attended the CE forum as well as the recent Safeguard awards. She had used the opportunities to emphasise to business leaders the critical importance of them demonstrating their commitment to improving health and safety outcomes in their organisations and delivering some key messages around good health and safety practices being good for business and productivity. Now is not the time to be thinking of cutting corners in health and safety.

The CE’s raised a number of challenges and opportunities in providing high quality health and safety leadership, these included:

• The problems of getting standard reporting (benchmarking)
• The profile of health and safety was considered low by some (e.g., some were not aware of the Safeguard Awards)
• It was considered worth exploring health and safety training from an early age, i.e., at school level (like the seat belt campaign)
• Promoting “incident free days” is a powerful message.

Council members discussed the CE forum further, some taking a cautious view of the initiative. Keeping the momentum up is important for real buy-in.

8.4.1 Requested that the Council be provided with a report from the CE’s forum outlining actions when it becomes available, along with the copies of the presentation by Tom Kraus, the keynote speaker. 

Other issues raised with the Minister

Council members took the opportunity to discuss some health and safety issues while the Minister was still in attendance. These issues included:

NOHSAC:

The concern of Unions about the future of NOHSAC (currently under review). This is seen as a ‘process issue’ and a couple of questions were raised around this:

• What is the role of the Council if it is not to make recommendations to the Minister?
• What is going to happen to the valuable function that critique plays in health and safety?

There was also concern about an inadequate logic stream for evaluating the value of committees like NOHSAC.

Health and safety representative training

• Unions have also learned of a significant cut to ACC health and safety representative training programmes. This will have an impact and is viewed as a policy issue.
• Resourcing issues: the system relies on training for health and safety representatives at level 1. This should not be compromised due to inadequate resourcing by Government. The logic that is coming from Government funders (such as ACC) is that when funding is reduced or ceases, the market will handle it. A review of ACC should also include the funding issue—the market may not handle health and safety training without incentivising businesses for managing this training.
• Officials from ACC responded—there has been a reduction in the budget for workplace health and safety representative training. Every dollar has to correlate with a reduction in injuries. An evaluation commissioned by ACC found no evidence of a link between health and safety representative training and reduced injury rates. ACC is still committing $2 million to workplace health and safety, but the responsibility for health and safety training also lies with employers.

ACTION

8.4.2 Requested that DoL report back to the Council’s August meeting on health and safety representative training position with options for future funding.

Item 8.5: Continued discussion on funding basis for industry training capability programmes [Action point 7.3.2]

At the previous meeting, Council members requested further time to discuss this item.
Council members discussed fishing as an inherently dangerous industry.

There was a question about what the law allows in terms of making proactive inspections.

Council members want to have clarity around Maritime NZ’s programme for managing risks and monitoring progress following the ACC withdrawal of funding for the fishsafe programme.  

ACC noted that there was a planned withdrawal of ACC funding, and there were discussions about Maritime NZ’s ongoing safety responsibilities.

It was noted that there is a context of funding decisions being made that have had impact on training provisions. For example, the Tertiary Education Commission has made some budget cuts which had implications for Farm Safe and Site Safe programmes. There was an acknowledgement that the answer to maritime health and safety is not necessarily Fishsafe but there does need to be a lead from Government about how to proceed without Government funding.

There were comments about the necessity of the job being done in the most effective way. It may be that Government is the most efficient funder of these programmes—particularly in the sense that safety culture is a community good—impacting on much more than just those in the workplace.

ACTION

8.5.1 Requested Maritime NZ be invited to the next Council meeting, along with the appropriate fishing industry council (e.g., Seafood Industry Council), to discuss how they are managing risks in this sector; including how they are maintaining health and safety programmes since ACC funding for Fishsafe was withdrawn.

WHSC STRATEGIC PRIORITIES AND ISSUES

Item 8.6:  Continuation of HSNO discussion [Action point 7.4.4] 

Discussion about HSNO carried forward from the previous meeting.

Questions were raised about whether there was a clear Strategy for HSNO identifying clear targets for improvement (e.g., a goal to increase inspection responses by 15 percent).

Council members suggestions to improve HSNO included:

• improving certification
• strengthening industry bodies (this encourages best practice, e.g., embalming industry)
• clarification of the roles involved in enforcement and prosecution
• company to company support – for example petrol station to petrol station
• improve inspector training
• link compliance to insurance premiums

Various council members raised a number of queries and comments for agencies to respond to:

• A plan base for compliance, codes of practice and standardised guidelines should be developed
• Can we increase compliance by 15 percent realistically (or is it 5 percent, 10 percent?)
• HSNO issues come back to first principles – the design of the legislation is a problem and legislation could usefully be reviewed
• Relationships between DoL, ERMA and MfE are problematic
• Compliance doesn’t necessarily equal safety—promoting ‘safety culture’ is important, and this is a useful concept for the DoL to drive
• There are a number of simple things to do to help compliance—for example suppliers to petrol stations could work together to improve safety (as petrol station to petrol station may not work). There is self interest for the suppliers so this should be leveraged.
• When there is low compliance it generally means that the legislation is too hard to follow—how could we make this easier to understand? ERMA requires more support
• There is a HSNO funding problem

Officials noted that there is a regulatory review taking place for HSNO and discussions are occurring between agencies about developing a compliance and enforcement strategy. At the next meeting officials would be better able to report back on progress.

ACTION

8.6.1 Requested officials report back on HSNO related activity across agencies.

Item 8.7:  Review of the Strategy – Outcomes Monitoring Framework

Kathy Drysdale (DoL) presented on the health and safety policy team’s development of an Outcomes Monitoring Framework to inform the Strategy review process.

The framework builds a data set to be used as a baseline for valid and reliable indicators to progress the vision of the Strategy. The idea is not to duplicate data sets but to make sense of them. This work is also partly a response to requests for data in the annual snapshot report.

The central concept is to link health and safety activities to results, gaining insight into what success looks like and how it is best measured.

The model is an intervention logic built using a staged process:

• hierarchy of outcomes
• how to measure change

The outcome measures chosen are those which have the greatest validity – some will be more useful than others. Existing measures include those derived from Stats NZ, ACC, CAA and Maritime NZ data sources.

This first phase of the work shows that there are clear data gaps in certain areas – for example, occupational health. 

Next phases of the work

1. Design a prototype using the measures identified, we have the theory but need a basis for using it. The prototype will then be able to be used as a critical consultation document
2. The longer term goal is to produce an annual report with the data measures included – i.e., “the state of workplace health and safety in New Zealand”

The next steps will include future proofing existing measures and potentially measuring the national priority areas – how can we construct effective measures that capture particular hazards, groups and small businesses for example?

Discussion

Following the presentation the Council members discussed the report.

One member noted that the report was a very complicated hierarchy and seemed more academic than workplace and economy focused. Simplifying it would make it more accessible rather than turning it into another compliance issue for businesses.

Another member was impressed by the report and was pleased to note the amount of data already in existence. A more crucial question for the member was which outcomes would be deleted.  Kathy indicated that the Strategy is the basis for the outcomes hierarchy.

DoL officials noted that the Outcomes Monitoring Framework is long overdue – calls for consistent metrics have been made for some time. The fundamental concept of the framework is sound but will be tweaked.

For the next phases of the work, additional surveys may be required. However, these surveys would be designed using existing frameworks to minimise the burden companies have of completing surveys. There would also be efforts to avoid duplication.

One member noted the issue of having too much information and whether any more surveying needed to be done. For example, how much of the existing data can inform the other outcomes in the framework? And of outcomes, what are the really critical ones to debate? If we contend that all outcomes are important then this isn’t practical.

Another member expressed concern about the number of data sources that were not available to DoL. Also concerned that work can focus too much on raising awareness which didn’t always produce results. Considered it a better strategy to focus on the clear issues – such as noise induced hearing loss – questioned how many ACC noise surveys had been done? Results on this issue would lead to a direct response to outcomes.

The phases of the work were discussed further. One member saw phase 1 (the current phase) as an analysis of what data we have and what it looks like. Phase 2 is the process for finding out what we do next. Many of the issues raised in the current discussion can be worked out at Phase 2.

Christopher Blake acknowledged the plea for simplicity and the need to pick the vital few indicators. If we want buy-in for the framework it needs to be clear and understandable.

Officials explained that by the next Council meeting in August, the prototype will be available for members to discuss. It was emphasised that the framework is not intended for publication but will help to inform the Strategy Review report back and will link to the Strategy’s goals and objectives.

ACTION

8.7.1  Noted the presentation from Kathy on the framework

8.7.2. Noted the availability of a prototype for the next Council meeting to discuss  

Item 8.7 continued

Strategy Stock-take Report

Kelly Hanson-White (DoL) presented on the Strategy Stock-take Report. She explained that this report covers the first three years of health and safety activity reported to the DoL. She emphasised that it would not cover all relevant activity, only that which respondents had chosen to highlight.

She noted that the least activity was reported in the “industry leadership and community engagement” category. This is either a function of the reporting process or a function of the actual situation.

A Council member noted that there are a lot of things happening in industry that were not directly attributable to the Strategy. There are different drivers for reporting activity. When the government does something, there is an awareness of the Strategy and efforts will be made to report on activity. The private sector will do what it does perhaps without reporting, this would show up in underreporting for the private sector. Members were unsure how to get a more accurate picture of industry health and safety activity, but talking directly with large companies should help.

According to the current reporting, DoL leads about 67% of all Strategy activity. Information coming from the Review forums suggests that the content of the Strategy is fine, but the biggest task is to know what is going on – reporting is a symptom of “how do we engage together on issues”. Small business reporting on health and safety activity continues to be a challenge.

A potential way forward, for maximum value, is to engage industry leaders who are a huge resource. Keep reporting on those companies who are doing health and safety well.

A member raised a question about why the DoL intended to remove the 49 actions from the Strategy. Kelly explained that the actions comprised a level of specificity that were not necessary. This is all up for discussion through the review process.

Kelly noted that the DoL is accountable for getting the Review report to the Minister by 30 June. Council members generally felt they had been adequately consulted throughout the review process.

Some other general comments were raised by various members about the Review:

• The Strategy is not able to measure a lot of important activities—it would be useful to have annual objectives.
• Currently we are engaging with people in the health and safety community who are already convinced of the importance of a Strategy—comments are therefore not a great surprise. It would be preferable to engage with those not conversant in health and safety.
• SME’s are not an homogeneous group, it’s too hard to directly compare them—however, the SME’s impact on the wider community is really important. They impact on a culture of behaviours locally through those employed.

ACTION

8.7.3 Noted the presentation from Kelly on the Strategy Stock-take Report

Item 8.8:  Review of the Council

Christopher Blake opened the discussion on the Council Review by emphasising the importance of the tripartite engagement represented in the composition of the Council as well as its function supporting international obligations.

Council members generally agreed that the Council was working well and that its composition was appropriate. Continuing on as usual was agreed to be acceptable and it was noted that officials were responding well to the Council’s requests. Members are contributing to the review through their one-to-one interviews with the review interviewers.

Some general comments were made by Council members in relation to the work of the Council:

• The opportunity at a senor level to get involved at an earlier stage of any process is valuable
• Can be open and honest within the Council because it is a safe environment, (for e.g., free of media)
• The Council, as a group, has developed over time to have moved from having a macro sense of the health and safety environment to having the ability for hands-on involvement and engagement.
• Extra time to debate issues is welcomed – longer meetings are more useful for this
• Eager to translate what is discussed at meetings into advice to Ministers
• When there is a significant decision to be made on health and safety, the Council should be briefed in order to articulate their point of view.

Officials noted that the Council set up is a unique structure with Ministers as Council members. Christopher Blake sometimes becomes the Ministers’ delegate.

Christopher Blake read out the objectives of the Council in the Terms of Reference to see if anything stood out as requiring change. There was general agreement that the objectives were still sound, and that the current tools the Council used should remain.

ACTION

8.8.1 Noted the discussion points raised about the Council Review

8.8.2 Noted the Council’s conformity with ILO Convention 155

ACTION

8.10.1 Agreed agenda items for the 17 September meeting:

• The Strategy Review (standing item agreed at April 2009 meeting)
• Health and Safety Representative Training provision
• Maritime New Zealand and fishing industry council to present on health and safety plan following withdrawal of funding
• Report back on HSNO regulatory inter-agency activity.

SUMMARY OF ACTIONS

Meeting closed 12.30pm, Wednesday 13 May 2009

Next meeting 9am-1pm, Thursday 17 September, 3.4 Members Only Dining Room, Beehive

Chair Phil O’Reilly