Question reference: S6W-21859
- Asked by: Claire Baker, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Scottish Labour
- Date lodged: 24 October 2023
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Current status: Answered by Angela Constance on 8 November 2023
Question
To ask the Scottish Government, further to the comments by the then Cabinet Secretary for Justice, during the stage 1 debate on the Culpable Homicide (Scotland) Bill on 21 January 2021, that the Scottish Government wants to work with bereaved families to produce a bill that could help to address the issues raised, but in a way that is within the Parliament’s devolved competence, and in light of Health and Safety Executive statistics on work-related fatal injuries in Great Britain in 2023, what its position is on whether the higher fatality rate in Scotland can be attributed to a greater proportion of people working in higher risk jobs; which employment areas it considers to be higher risk, and what sector-specific action it can take to address any increased risk.
Answer
The Health and Safety Executive (the HSE) operates across the UK including in Scotland under governance from the Department of Work and Pensions within the UK Government. The HSE is responsible for helping people be safer at work.
As part of their responsibilities for workplace safety, the HSE publishes workplace safety statistics for Scotland. In November 2022, they published the latest statistics:
Workplace health and safety statistics for Scotland, 2022 (hse.gov.uk)
In presenting these statistics, the HSE indicated that '... this report represents a profile of workplace health and safety in Scotland and its primary purpose is to provide Scotland specific equivalents of the statistics for Great Britain published across HSE’s Health and Safety Statistics pages. The figures also enable comparisons between Scotland and Great Britain to be made. However, any such comparative analysis should be interpreted with caution since any differences in health and safety outcomes are likely to be at least in part driven by differences in the industry sectors and occupations people work in.'
More specifically, the HSE has carried out a statistical analysis of fatalities in the workplace across the nations of the UK. On page 15 of their November 2022 report, they indicated the following:
'Over recent years, the fatal injury rate in Scotland has been consistently higher than that of Great Britain, but there is no difference in the rate of non-fatal injuries. One explanation is that in Scotland, a greater proportion of workers are employed in higher risk industry sectors or higher risk occupations, compared with Great Britain as a whole. It is possible to standardise fatal injury rates by adjusting them to account for differences in industry composition between countries and regions and a recent research report shows the effect this has on the relative rates of the countries and regions of Great Britain.
The following table shows estimates of the unstandardised and standardised country-specific fatal injury rates for the period 2015/16-2019/20 (the full report can be found at www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/adhoc analysis/updated-standardised-fatals.pdf) .
Number, un-standardised rate and standardised rate of fatal injuries per 100,000 workers (2015-16 – 2019-20)
Country | Number of Fatalities | Un-standardised rate of fatal injuries per 100,000 workers
| Standardised rate of fatal injuries per 100,000 workers |
Scotland
| 88 | 0.65 | 0.57 |
England
| 529 | 0.38 | 0.39 |
Wales
| 58 | 0.81 | 0.65 |
Great Britain | 675 | 0.42 | NA |
The standardised rate for Scotland is lower than the un-standardised rate, demonstrating that its different industry composition does have an effect on the comparison between Scotland and Great Britain. However, even after standardisation the rate is still significantly higher in Scotland. It is likely that other factors, such as a different occupational distribution and other factors not related to employment, are also affecting the comparison. However, at present there is insufficient data available to enable the quantification of these effects.'
The Scottish Government will work with the HSE in any aspects where devolved issues arise to help the HSE deliver their reserved statutory responsibilities in the area of workplace safety.