UCATT Reaction To Delay In Government Inquiry Into Construction Fatalities

Construction union UCATT have welcomed the decision to delay by two months the report into fatalities in the construction industry.

The chair of the Inquiry Rita Donaghy was due to have submitted her report to James Purnell the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions on April 30. UCATT has learnt that the report will now not be submitted until late June.

Alan Ritchie, General Secretary of UCATT, said: “The decision to extend the inquiry is welcomed. When the inquiry was launched late last year we privately warned that there would not be sufficient time to examine all areas of the industry. Our concerns have now proved top be justified”.

The decision to hold the inquiry was a direct result of lobbying by UCATT of the Government. The Government agreed in July 2008 that an inquiry into construction fatalities would be held in order to assess whether statutory director’s duties should be introduced.

Construction is the most dangerous industry in Britain. In 2007/8 there were 72 deaths of construction workers, the figure for 2006/7 was 79.

Mr Ritchie, added: “I hope that the extra time that the inquiry will now have will mean that issues including statutory director’s duties, casualisation, gangmasters, blacklisting and endemic bogus self-employment will be properly examined. There was a real danger with a truncated inquiry was that these issues which are critical to site safety could have been glossed over.”

Since the inquiry was announced last summer UCATT have lobbied for its brief to be as wide as possible and argued against the inquiry becoming a paper shuffling exercise which purely looked at the inner machinations of the Health and Safety Executive.

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