Stephen Britton, Health & Safety Officer (Episode 70)

Stephen Britton, Health & Safety Officer (Episode 70)

Sarah’s guest for this episode is Stephen Britton. Stephen is currently a Biological Safety Officer at Durham University. Prior to that he spent over 20 years working for the UK Government’s Health & Safety Executive.

Sarah and Stephen talk about 

• Our changing appetite for risk and what life might be like without health and safety regulations
• Some of the major incidents he has investigated
• Why the constant churn of university research projects creates safety challenges
• The far-reaching impact of his chosen career compared to staying in research

Find out more

• Read the show notes and transcript on the podcast website
• Connect to Stephen on LinkedIn

About Research Adjacent

• Fill out the research-adjacent careers quiz
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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
I always say to people, even ifyou're not gonna write something

(00:02):
down, say it out loud to yourself orsomeone else, and you'll go, yeah.
Does that sound like a good idea?
Really, you're gonna stand inthat wheelie chair and put those
Christmas decorations up here.
You've got a grant foran electron microscope.
That's fantastic.
Do you know how much thepower supply is gonna cost?

(00:23):
It now needs to be in a temperaturemonitored room, and it needs to
be in a dust free environment, andit now needs an access control.
Now it needs to be a clean lab.
That's all 200,000 pounds worth ofspend that you don't have that we're
now gonna have to find somewhere.
Actually, I think I've had fargreater reach and impact doing
what I've done subsequently thanI ever did working that research.

(00:48):
Hello and welcome.
I'm your host, Sarah, and this is episode70 of the Research Adjacent Podcast.
Today we turn our attention tohealth and safety, and if you've ever
worked in a lab, the mere mentionof those words might make you groan.
But today's guest, StephenBritton, is here to help us
appreciate these unsung heroes.
Honestly.
Stephen is currently biological safetyofficer at Durham University, but before

(01:09):
that, he spent over 20 years workingfor the Health and Safety Executive, the
government department, which sets andenforces health and safety legislation.
In our conversation, Stephen paints apicture of what life would be like without
the current regulations, some of themajor incident that he's been involved
in investigating and why the constantchurn of university research projects
can throw up particular challenges.

(01:30):
Listen on to hear Stephen's story.
Welcome along to the podcast, Stephen.
It's fantastic to have you here,we know each other already in
a slightly different context.
So this is gonna be a first to hearall about what you do for work.
So tell us what is it that you do?
Currently I do health and safetyand biological safety at Durham Uni.

(01:51):
So way back in the nineties I did aPhD in human genetics and from there I
went straight to the Health and SafetyExecutive who were the the National
Regulator for Health and Safety in the UK.
So I spent about 10 years doinggeneral health and safety.
Started out doingagriculture and woodworking.
We then became more general groupswhere I covered every type of sort

(02:14):
of general manufacturing industryon top of that I then moved
across to the chemicals division.
So I would inspect big chemical plantson Teesside and quite a few fires and
explosions and that sort of stuff.
And then one of my former colleagues, hadmoved to Durham Uni and become head of
health and safety there, and he enticedme into kind of knowing my background to

(02:36):
come and bring my knowledge of chemicaland biological safety plus sort of, so
I've ended up kind of 20 years later,back and in university environment, but
in the sort of professional services sideof the university, the sort of always the
slightly worse off half of it thatuniversities are very structured towards

(02:57):
their academic activity and kind ofprofessional services are kind of
the unsung heroes in the background,helping everything actually happen.
Yeah, definitely.
That's very much the theme of thispodcast is to do something, to tell the
stories I think of those unsung heroes.
So anybody who's worked in a researchlab will have some vague sense of

(03:17):
health and safety, but their sense ofit is probably just oh, I have to fill
in like risk assessments or something.
Tell us a bit about what, whatworking in health and safety means.
That's, that that's alwaysbeen the problem of it.
And when, back when I worked ina lab, someone suddenly thought,
oh, we should do some safety.
So we had this big folder ofSDSs, literally, I would say

(03:38):
probably six or 700 of them.
And we had to sign to saythat we'd seen all these.
What's an SDS?
The safety data sheet.
Oh, yes.
Every substance that you use, theyused to be called MSDSs they've
been called SDSs for a while now.
But yeah, so you know the productdata sheet if you like, of
like how that affects people.
And you would just sign the thingand every now and then you'd go, oh,

(04:00):
we're having a safety inspection.
So we would clear the lab up andwe'd shut all the fire doors back up.
'cause we had the long kindof a long lab with various.
Rooms through it, which we usedto prop the fire doors open all
the time in because 'cause youneeded to carry stuff through.
Yeah.
And now that I work in health and safety,I know that is perfectly legitimate if

(04:21):
you are in control of the door and in anemergency you would shut it behind you.
So it's like we used to do stuffand kind of hide things from people.
I ended up doing safety stuff because Irandomly, I was writing up my PhD. I'm
thinking about what I want to do next.
I would, I'd been applyingto various scientific jobs,
so I'd been to AstraZeneca.

(04:42):
I'd been for interviews and Unilevereven who have techie people that are
involved in making various things.
And got reasonably close tolanding some of those jobs.
And then in a pub one night someonehad suggested, I give health and
safety a go because I'm quite goodat talking to people and quite good
at putting technical stuff across.

(05:03):
And they worked as an operationalinspector and it was like, they'll take
you in and they'll train you and youdidn't have to pay to retrain or whatever.
So you go, oh, they're fantastic.
So I got through that selection processand you then move into the real world,
and everyone's come across a riskassessment as a thing, but everyone does
it as a set of two tick boxes almost.
That's this risk is this number and nowit's that number, and that doesn't help

(05:26):
anybody and it's just unproductive alot of that, that it's it's so boring
and what you're actually wanting peopleto do is think about what it is that,
what is it you're doing and what.
Is there an industry standardout there that tells you
what you need to do about it?
So it's is there alreadya code of practice, like
putting scaffolding up, right?
Something that you'll see on every street.

(05:48):
They're always built the same wayand they always look identical.
Funnily enough, there's acode of practice they have to
follow and it's that approach.
So yes, you use that number systemand all of that, and that's usually
used to justify spending money onstuff that you go, we have this
problem, we need to sort it out.
And because it's such a high hazard, you,there's a justifiable spend behind it.

(06:10):
So you've gotta get that past yourfinance people, but at a local
level and stuff within your control.
That's always the thing I advocate,is find a benchmark standard.
Look at that, see how that applies towhat you're doing and write down the
stuff you're gonna do to keep people safe.
And that's as simple as it needs tobe, but it's all a tedious form filling

(06:30):
that everyone thinks that's getting inthe way of what I'm trying to do until
something goes wrong or someone's gota bit of ill health and then suddenly
you are looking back at all thispaperwork and going why didn't we think
about that and why didn't we do this?
Yeah.
And if only, and all of that stuff.
And I've even had that.
People having incidents, havingattended one of our sessions, having

(06:52):
the equipment available in a nearbyshed, but choosing not to use it.
Yeah.
Because it's just a two minutejob and then the fallen out of the
bucket of a telehandler to theirdeath and you're going, you had a
cage that you could have put on the
on the fork truck, 25 meters away,it would've taken you two minutes
literally to go and fetch it.

(07:12):
But you didn't bother becauseyou thought it was just gonna
be straight up, do a thing.
Yeah.
Fall down and it, that's the,I guess what I wasn't ready for
joining the national regulators.
You always.
In terms of incidents, you go to theworst stuff that happens, so the scale
of the incidents are so much more thanpeople have in other sectors, like Yeah.

(07:33):
Not long after I joined thechemical sector, we had an aerosol
warehouse that burned down.
So I was months and monthsin investigating that.
And that evening I found myself in policeheadquarters advising them whether or
not the plume of smoke coming out of thiswarehouse was likely to impinge on the A1

(07:53):
or the Great North train line and whetheror not they should shut the train line.
Oh, goodness me.
And you're thinking, and you're thinking,wow, welcome to the chemical sector.
Yeah.
I wasn't expecting this.
And it was fireworks night andthat's where the organized fireworks
display was supposed to happen.
So they had to cancel all that.
'cause they were busy and half theirfire engines were obviously busy.
Yeah.

(08:14):
And of all the days in all theworld when you don't want the fire
brigade to have a lot to deal with.
November the fifth is definitelythe one where you're like, wow.
Yeah.
So I ended up having avery long day that day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's as a result of that, werealized that aerosol warehouses
don't burn down in quite the sort of,it, it was always invis, it was like

(08:37):
a pop type uhhuh scenario that eachindividual aerosol would go burst.
Yeah.
And it would just immediately go on fire.
What you actually had was you couldhave buildups of gas at certain
points and get quite large explosions.
So we ended up doing quite a lotof different sort of policy stuff
in the background to look at howyou store large quantities of

(08:58):
these types of materials because
obviously once they startYeah, you can't put it out.
You basically just sit back andwatch it burn for three days.
That must be reallyinteresting with some things.
'cause there must be quite a lot of stuff.
Technology's moving on all thetime, chemicals, products, all sorts
of stuff moving on all the time.
And sometimes it must be like that, thatyou don't know until something happens

(09:20):
and then you say, oh goodness me, wedidn't think it was gonna go like this.
No, exactly.
And it the thing about the history ofhealth and safety is that whenever someone
says, oh, it's health and safety gonemad, and you go, okay, then which set
of regulations do you mean here then?
You name me a set of regulationsthat you don't just read and think
actually that all makes sense.
Yeah.
And if there's a big regimethat's come into being.

(09:43):
You can normally trace it backto something that happened
immediately leading up to it.
So you go, the healthand safety at work act.
Why did that happen?
There was Flixborough andthere was the Aberfan disaster.
They pulled the UK together intokind of there was two huge disasters
involved, quite large numbers of people.
And we realized we weren't dealing withthe risks of those particularly well.

(10:04):
And that's how the health andsafety worker came into being.
From formally the factories act.
'cause that only applied to factories.
Okay.
And there was nothing in place formembers of the public affected by
stuff, which is what Aberfan was about.
Obviously there was a. Alarge pile of coal slag, which
I was gonna say was the landslideonto the school that Yeah,
that's the one that people have seen onthe, episodes of the Queen that like 105

(10:28):
children died or something wild like that.
So yeah, when you scalestuff up to big sizes.
That's when you realize that's whereall the regimes have come into place.
So for, so for example, the reasonwe have building regulations
of how you build buildings wasafter the Great Fire of London.
So it's yeah, we have tohave a really big disaster.
And then we go oh oh well.

(10:49):
That didn't go well.
Why don't we think about thata bit better so that we design
buildings so that they don't havefire breaks and all of that stuff.
And, the more recently you canpull that forward to Grenfell where
obviously large buildings with aninability to fight those fires had
never really been thought about before.
Yeah.

(11:09):
So the reason HSE got that job isbecause we've been looking at chemical
plants and how you bring togetherdifferent agencies to monitor those
kind of environments for decades.
So they're the obvious agencyto then go we know how to do, we
know how to do this sort of thing.
Or how to pull the expertisetogether to 'cause that was the.

(11:32):
The great thing about working in thatenvironment was there was always an expert
somewhere that you could call upon Yeah.
To go, we've come across this, wedon't really know what, where we
are with this, and put feelers outto come up with a position on it.
To actually think stuff through fromfirst principles or commission research.
Yeah.
The aerosol warehouse stuff, I knewthat we'd done things like this.

(11:53):
They have a, a lab in Buxton where theycan test things and do all sorts yeah.
Going back to your original kind of pointwhen you're trying to assess something,
walking through a process and thinkingabout stuff as it comes up in a sequence
is often a good way of thinking about it.
'cause
Yeah.
And where are the pointswhere you need to do something

(12:14):
and it's usually where there's ahandover between one person and another.
There's a fitter who does this bit.
There may be a fitter that does thatbit, but there's something in the
middle which you haven't identifiedthat anyone has to do anything with.
So it, that's often how things dropthrough the cracks whatever it is,
there's some kind of process flow.

(12:34):
Yeah.
And people are reallygood at the main bit.
Making the thing, looking after the thing.
They're not really verygood at deliveries.
They're not very good atgetting rid of the waste.
I always used to startat the peripheral bits.
The bits you don't really care about.
They're the bits that are gonna catchyou out and horrible maintenance stuff.
And like the main process isusually pretty well controlled

(12:56):
and people thought about it 'causethere's quality issues or whatever.
And you are measuring that becausethat's how you make all your money.
But it's actually thinking aboutthe other bits on the back end where
you will have the biggest inroads.
'cause you suddenly find the stuffthat's a bit unloved and not looked
after that's gonna let you downone random, wet, rainy weekend.
Yeah.
And you're gonna climb up a ricketyladder to try and get it to go again.

(13:19):
Yes.
you're gonna come a cropper.
Yeah, exactly that.
That is really, and it makesa lot of sense actually
'cause I think even.
I think in terms of any job, like yousay, whether it's a factory or whether
it's like doing what I do, I might paygood attention to doing the podcast and
so on, but I don't always pay attentiongood attention to some of the kinda admin

(13:39):
things or the legal things or the thingsaround the periphery that, you know.
Yeah.
I'll get round to that at some point.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And in universities, for example, they.
The thing I've had thrown at mein the couple of years I've been
back in that environment is theygo it's, we are different to

(14:00):
industry because we're changingall the time and doing new things.
And you're going.
Yeah.
You don't know how industryworks at all, do you?
Because,
oh, so yeah.
I was gonna ask you, what are the dthe big differences that you found
coming into the university now in the
So people have this idea that a chemicalplant, for example, is this dedicated
thing that just does one thing andthey chug away, making whatever it is.

(14:23):
There are plants that do that, butthey're becoming fewer and far between,
and there's a lot more like tollmanufacturing where you say, I need.
A couple of hundredliters of this product.
And they will make that for you.
So they go through a managementof change process to do that.
They go how do we needto configure the plant?
Are there any specific safety concerns?

(14:45):
What do we need to thinkabout with that mix?
Set the alarms, set the triggerpoints, the, all of that stuff.
Universities don't have a muchproper management of change process.
You just have some people, they applyfor some grants, they win a grant.
They then go, I need a roomconverting to do this thing.

(15:06):
And they may or may not have consultedall the right people to know, do
you know what infrastructure youneed to support that piece of kit?
Brilliant.
You've got a grant foran electron microscope.
That's fantastic.
Do you know how much thepower supply is gonna cost?
It now needs to be in a temperaturemonitored room and it needs to
be in a dust free environment andit now needs an access control.

(15:28):
Now it needs to be a clean lab.
That's all 200,000 pounds worth ofspend that you don't have that we're now
gonna have to find somewhere that youcould have applied for in proper grants
if you'd thought about it properly.
And it's because academics aren't giventhe right training early enough to
go when you're applying for a grant,this is actually a project that you're

(15:50):
trying to build and these are what,what needs to come into that project?
Do you know, it's interestingthis business of actually having
conversations, so I, in the world Iwork in is the kind of communication
and public engagement side of things.
And I would be saying the same thing.
If you'd come and spoken to me before youput the grant application in, we could
have properly costed for you to have,an animation or a website or a podcast

(16:14):
or whatever else it is that you want.
And it's so interesting that you'resaying exactly the same thing.
It's yeah, talk to us before you.
Start down this path,
And there's even experts within
bits of the university who would know how,which fundings you can probably tap into.
And the problem they have isthey're busy teaching, they're

(16:37):
busy doing the current work.
Applying for grants is time consuming.
And you get one in 10of them or something.
Yeah.
And it's if you get the grant,it's whoa, and now what do we do?
So it's so hit and miss as towhether or not you're gonna get it.
They consider it difficult then to planstrategically to put stuff together.

(16:58):
Yeah.
But yeah, I am working on it.
Yes.
Because having been in a differentenvironment, you can come to it with
different eyes to be able to go wehaven't got an end-to-end process here.
Have we, we haven't thoughtabout those elements.
If we can get closer to that andhave my colleagues in estates and
facilities kind of areas more cluedinto when you want to cost up a job.

(17:22):
Yeah.
It's not, this isn't costing up areal job that's actually happening.
This is just that, a ballpark figure.
Yes.
In order to be able toput on the application.
Yeah.
So they go, all right, okay.
Yeah.
Because they didn't know thatwas a thing kind of thing.
So it's, you nobody knows stuffoutside of their sphere of influence.

(17:42):
Yeah.
Until you pull them together,
start pulling it together.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of what you end up doing.
Some of it is safety related, butmost of it is efficiency related.
And so you, there's often a, like in a lotof environments safety and environment and

(18:03):
quality are often pulled together 'cause.
If you get the quality that youknow you are doing good research.
Yes.
But that's so getting back to thepoint earlier of the main activity you
are trying to do, if you've put goodquality processes in place to make
sure you make widgets of the rightquality chances are the safety elements
will fall into place because of that.
Yes.
Because they have to Yeah.

(18:24):
In order to get the quality output.
Yeah.
It's repeatable and, and, withinparameters and all of that stuff.
So there, there won't be any safetyhazards built out of that 'cause in
order to be reproducible, chances arethe kit is all properly thought through.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Makes a lot of sense.
So you've said there you toldus a little bit at the beginning
about your journey into this.

(18:45):
So you originally did a PhD and then endedup, So it is civil service, isn't it?
Health and safety executive.
Yes.
They're a Civil Service Department.
Yes.
And it And was that a, like atraining program that you went into?
Yeah, they run a two year program to bringyou up to speed and send you on a you
have to do a post-graduate diploma so thatyou have a similar level of level level

(19:07):
theoretical knowledge as folk out there.
But the, and there's specific courseson different aspects like machinery
safety and construction safety andchemical stuff and extraction and
Legionella and you, you think of atopic and I've been on course on it.
So it's a very, it's a very broad trainingto cover all kinds of eventuality.

(19:29):
Yeah.
All sorts of stuff.
So you are, you're a a real generalist.
So you're a master of nothing,but you have enough savvy to
know what you're looking at.
From the get go.
But then you have technicalexperts lurking in other
parts of the organization.
If you're not sure about something,you can take pictures and go seen this?
Yeah.
What do you think?

(19:50):
Or, you pass it by colleagues and so on'cause nobody knows everything from the
get go, but you very quickly get veryfamiliar with, different environments,
but that gets to a point of tediumthat like you walk in somewhere, you
glance around the room and you know whatyou're going talk about for two hours.
Like you just go that that, and that.

(20:10):
Okay.
Which order do I want to do?
A minute?
I'll guess I'll go clockwise or, yeah.
I often used to go goods, likeI used to follow the process,
like goods into, goods out.
Used to be the way I would
Just walk.
Walk through it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Walk me through a process and we'lltalk about the stuff as it comes up.
Yeah.
Over and above what you can see.
Because that's always myproblem with people doing safety

(20:31):
inspections or that kind of thing.
It's just you are justlooking for the obvious.
Yeah.
And it's mostly trivia.
Like a bit of tripping hazardhere or a bit of whatever.
Yeah.
Actually having a proper conversationwith people about what they do.
Then unearths stuff that yougo, oh, that's interesting.
Not sure that's the best way to do that.
Yeah.
And then you can get into thatconversation and and again, sometimes

(20:55):
that involves a large degree of spend,but actually the place is usually
thankful for your input because.
You've pointed something out tothem, which could lead them to
financial disaster down the line.
Yeah.
Because almost invariably, if you havea big incident there's a huge fine.
Yeah.

(21:15):
There's consequencesfor the the institution.
Their reputations dragged through the mud.
Yeah.
It nothing good comes of it.
No.
It's usually really easily prevented.
That's always the irony ofmost kind of incidences.
I always say to people, even ifyou're not gonna write something
down, say it out loud to yourself orsomeone else, and you'll go, yeah.

(21:40):
Does that sound like a good idea?
Really.
You're gonna stand in thatwheelie chair and put those
Christmas decorations up here.
That doesn't sound like a best idea.
I'm gonna stand on my desk.
Yeah.
Okay.
Does it look sturdy?
Not really sure.
Should we go and get the ladder?
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah.
Maybe speak.

(22:00):
Ah, what's the risk?
Why are you always going on andyou go do you do know that 60%
of all fatal accidents are lessthan two meters off the ground?
Which is most of all of that sort of stuff
but that's always the challengewith the stuff is there are people
who are overly fussy and overlypaperwork focused who drag it down

(22:23):
to it, oh God, why am I doing this?
Which then undermines the kindof the purpose of it for others.
Yeah.
That there are better ways or, everyonecan be a bit jobsworthy sometimes.
And there's no need.
And it's that's not its purpose.
So there, there's often people arejust told that they have to do a thing
and they don't really understand.

(22:45):
Actually, if you have thatconversation of what it is you are
bringing to the party, they canthen understand what they're doing.
And know when to ask for help.
'cause often people aren'ttaking shortcuts for, usually
for sometimes they're in a bitof a hurry or that kind of thing.
But often people are trying to savethe company time and effort and bother.

(23:08):
They're genuinely trying to help.
In doing so have put themselvesat a bit of risk and over time
your perception of risk changes.
So like I, if you or I tried to usea circular saw, I'd give you a push
stick and you'd keep your hands agood 30 centimeters from the blade

(23:28):
and be very happy that you stillhad all your parts attached when you
got a bit of wood to go through it.
Over time doing that severalthousand times a day, you become
completely blase to that risk.
Yeah.
And I've seen people putting theirfingers either side of a saw blade
making a notch in something and you wait.
Yeah.
And then interrupt them to go,can you please stop doing that?

(23:49):
Yes.
And go, why are you doingthat with that machine?
You've got other equipment in here.
You could do that safe completely safely.
Yeah.
Without any loss of time.
And how have you ended up Yeah, just doingit like that when the slight slightest
slip and you're gonna lose fingers.
Yeah.

(24:10):
And they don't go back on offsaw blades usually either.
'cause they
I don't even really want to think aboutit if I was, to be absolutely honest
The expertise you pick up working insafety is a unbelievable, that's like
you've met enough people who've hadsurgery on different things that it's like
you know what is or isn't going to work.
And yeah, it's it's one of those areaswhere, I don't know, everyone thinks,

(24:35):
oh, God, safety, they're so boring,and why would you wanna do that?
But actually saving people fromthemselves is and feeling like I've
actually influenced that organizationI was challenged once in a very well
performing chemical plant, and he'd saywhat do you think you bring to a job?
And I'd say, okay.
So companies often don't knowhow they're performing because

(25:02):
everyone lies to their manager.
Or you may have a bully or someone.
And the truth, we can't tell you the truthbecause you'll all start yelling at us.
So then you end up getting a consultantto find out why are things not working
the way we want who come around andfamously just tell everyone exactly
what they already know and have beensaying for years, but because it's
now from a third party, you can'tshout at 'em and that's all great.

(25:26):
Where I think a regulator comesin is I do all that same stuff.
I find out from your people exactly whatthey think of the systems they've got and
how confident they're and they're working.
And I then make you fix it to a timescale that we think is reasonable so
that we get stuff done and sometimesthat's quite expensive and the

(25:48):
company has a bit of a twist about it.
But ultimately you walk away thinkingI've added value to that process in
that there's people way safer therenow than there ever was before.
Yeah.
So it feels like you getthat job satisfaction there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And and investigating incidents.

(26:09):
I remember a good, a really goodcolleague when I was being trained, and
he said, if you can prosecute somebody,and at the end of it they thank you
for it, you know you've done it right?
That, that you've punished them forthe thing that they've done, but
they've learned something from it andyou've pushed them onto a different

(26:29):
paradigm and they all of thosepeople will learn something from it.
The difficulty is tryingto embed that in the place.
Because those individualsthat's in them now.
But in an organization, you'regoing, yeah, everyone will learn
from that one incident that time.
But if you can embed that inthe way people think about stuff

(26:49):
and why they think about it,
you've then made a better sortof place to work for people.
And yeah, that's all right.
Isn't an outcome.
That's pretty good.
It's pretty good to be ableto say you've done that.
Yeah.
So I started out thinking,oh, I want to help people.
I want to do stuff.
I was studying a genetic disease and youthink I've now found how this has caused

(27:14):
and that might influence, oh, I dunno, 25people around the world maybe but actually
I think I've had far greater reach andimpact doing what I've done subsequently
than I ever did working that research.
That's why I wanted to escapethat lab and just feel like I'm
sat just pipetting stuff around.

(27:34):
This is not for me.
Like there's so muchmore I could be doing.
And it does sound like what you'vedone has made a difference in
lots of different workplaces.
So I think as I like to ask myguests that if they had a magic
wand, what would they do differentlyin the world that they work in?
What would they change?
What do you think?
So I'll stick with thehealth and safety stuff.

(27:57):
What I would like as a magic wandwould be that companies always act
in a responsible manner, rather thanalways push for shareholder value.
That they actually do what they knowis the right thing to do rather than
get round things because they'vegot shareholders on their backs.

(28:19):
If you think there's a goodexample of that Boeing.
Boeing were famously brilliant.
Engineers were always incharge of their decisions.
They made really good, robust equipmentand they had a great safety record.
And then because they were fallingbehind Europe the European manufacturer,
they introduced a new variant of aplane that they knew was unstable.

(28:43):
Rather than put a safety system into, to solve the problem that had two
instruments and the computer taking bothinstruments, like readings, and then
taking action based on the pair of them.
Yeah.
Which is really quite easy to engineerand what the engineers wanted to happen.
They didn't want to do thatbecause they'd have to tell the

(29:04):
regulator they'd done a thing.
And then, so they took the shortcut, whichwas just to have the computer randomly
pick one of the instruments and justbelieve what it said, and if it failed, it
then tipped those aircraft into the sea.
So that's the 7 3 7 Max, yeah.
Sort of stuff that happened.
And it just boils down to it justchasing corporate greed and letting

(29:27):
the managers do things, which theengineers were desperate not to do.
Yeah.
So it's that above everything thatyou go, being able to go, no, we're
gonna do the right thing by our people.
Yeah.
Not just the shareholders.
Yeah.
It feels like very similar to what'sgoing on with the water companies at the

(29:48):
moment as well, and sewage and everything.
It's, oh,
What do you call them?
Macquarie have farmed what?
A billion pounds out of Thames Water.
Yeah.
And then left.
Left that organization andthen it their infrastructure
has been rotting around them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's really shocking.
That feels to me like poor regulation.

(30:10):
Yeah.
And that's always what I always readinto whenever there's a political
discussion about we need to get rid ofall this red tape that is always code
for, we'd like to start like ruiningsomebody's lives because we want to
make more money by taking shortcuts,and that's never the right thing to me.
Anyone that talks about deregulatingsomething, you always wanna prick

(30:33):
your ears up to exactly whatit is they're talking about.
Yeah,.
it's the bad press that safety stuffgets when actually, do you want people
to go to work and not come home in thesame state they were when they started.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or do you, do we wanna look after people?
Because if we've broken that person,then we're gonna have to look after them.

(30:55):
Yeah, absolutely.
Wouldn't it be better just to stop
time and money and everything else?
But that company doesn't necessarilyhave to fund the costs of all that, and
that's when you go that's not right.
I would say the take home thing Iwould want folk to take from this is,
yeah, sometimes the forms are tedious.
And you can always work with theperson that came up with the forms

(31:16):
to go can we make this a bit better?
Or can we make it electronic?
Or can we do something and make sure weshare stuff around each other so that
I'm not rewriting the same flippingthing that everyone else is doing.
But actually getting to themeat of that to go, what do
I need to do to this safely?
And thinking about the process asyou go along is invaluable, and the

(31:38):
chances are if you've done that you'llget a better outcome anyway because
you'll have planned it properly.
Yeah.
And you'll get a better experiment.
You'll get a better result for whateverit is you're trying to achieve.
Yeah.
And I think that's what allany of us want, isn't it?
Do a good job, come homesafe and in one piece.
Yeah.
So thank you so much for sharing allof those insights in your career story.

(32:02):
If anybody wants to get in touch with you,do you hang out on social media at all?
To a limited extent, I have to say.
Yeah.
It's not a place I live.
I am on LinkedIn.
Yeah.
If and yeah, I've, when you were talkingabout, the evangelism part of it, I do
believe some of that is very good anduseful and yes, I do talks and bits.

(32:25):
If folk were want, wanted me todo presentations on things I've
done many of them over the years.
Excellent.
Oh, people can track you down there.
I'll get a link and popthat in the show notes.
Thank you so much, Stephen, for comingalong and telling us all about what
it's like to work in health and safety.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.