‘Complacent’ HSE admits workplace cancer errors

Work-related cancers will claim thousands of lives each year as a result of “shocking complacency” by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), a new report has said.

Burying the evidence, by Andrew Watterson and Rory O’Neill of Stirling University, concludes that the HSE has neither the resources nor the strategy to tackle workplace carcinogen exposures, which kill at least 12,000 people each year.

Warning that the HSE’s recommendations for action “range from complacent to non-existent”, Watterson added: “Its evaluations on cancer-causing substances including benzene, cadmium, diesel exhaust and wood dust are error-ridden, inadequate and outdated. Whole categories of workers known to be at high risk are ignored, and the HSE cannot quantify and continues to neglect the risk to women.”

The report was published as the HSE issued its action plan on workplace cancers at a London seminar on 25-26 June. Outside the event, demonstrators from the Cancer Prevention Coalition wore “stop work cancer” t-shirts while waving whitewash and prescriptions.

At the seminar, the HSE admitted that its previous cancer incidence estimates were wrong, and said that six cancers alone are responsible for 7,380 deaths per year in the UK.

Commenting on the revised figure, TUC head of safety Hugh Robertson said: “The [HSE’s] researchers stressed that this was likely to be an underestimation, as much of the employment data was out of date or unavailable.”

Burying the evidence: How the UK is prolonging the occupational cancer epidemic is available at www.hazards.org/cancer/hsecriticism