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

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

Find out more

1. Read the show notes and transcript on the podcast website
2. Connect to Stephen on LinkedIn

About Research Adjacent

1. Fill out the research-adjacent careers quiz
2. Sign up to the Research Adjacent newsletter
3. Follow Research Adjacent on LinkedIn Instagram and BlueSky
4. Email a comment, question or suggestion
5. Leave Sarah a voice message

Mentioned in this episode:

Member of the Month: Vicky Bowskill, Inklusive Nature

Vicky helps researchers and changemakers to connect nature, science & society by telling compelling visual stories. Find out more at www.inklusivenature.com

Interested in advertising on the podcast?

If you have a service, product, event, or opportunity that would be of interest to our audience get in touch via hello@researchadjacent.com to explore how we can work together.

I always say to people, even if you're not gonna write something

down, say it out loud to yourself or someone else, and you'll go, yeah.

Does that sound like a good idea?

Really, you're gonna stand in that wheelie chair and put those

Christmas decorations up here.

You've got a grant for an electron microscope.

That's fantastic.

Do you know how much the power supply is gonna cost?

It now needs to be in a temperature monitored room, and it needs to

be in a dust free environment, and it now needs an access control.

Now it needs to be a clean lab.

That's all 200,000 pounds worth of spend that you don't have that we're

now gonna have to find somewhere.

Actually, I think I've had far greater reach and impact doing

what I've done subsequently than I ever did working that research.

Hello and welcome.

I'm your host, Sarah, and this is episode 70 of the Research Adjacent Podcast.

Today we turn our attention to health and safety, and if you've ever

worked in a lab, the mere mention of those words might make you groan.

But today's guest, Stephen Britton, is here to help us

appreciate these unsung heroes.

Honestly.

Stephen is currently biological safety officer at Durham University, but before

that, he spent over 20 years working for the Health and Safety Executive, the

government department, which sets and enforces health and safety legislation.

In our conversation, Stephen paints a picture of what life would be like without

the current regulations, some of the major incident that he's been involved

in investigating and why the constant churn of university research projects

can throw up particular challenges.

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 hear all about what you do for work.

So tell us what is it that you do?

Currently I do health and safety and biological safety at Durham Uni.

So way back in the nineties I did a PhD in human genetics and from there I

went straight to the Health and Safety Executive who were the the National

Regulator for Health and Safety in the UK.

So I spent about 10 years doing general health and safety.

Started out doing agriculture and woodworking.

We then became more general groups where I covered every type of sort

of general manufacturing industry on top of that I then moved

across to the chemicals division.

So I would inspect big chemical plants on Teesside and quite a few fires and

explosions and that sort of stuff.

And then one of my former colleagues, had moved to Durham Uni and become head of

health and safety there, and he enticed me into kind of knowing my background to

come and bring my knowledge of chemical and 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 side of the university, the sort of always the

slightly worse off half of it that universities are very structured towards

their academic activity and kind of professional services are kind of

the unsung heroes in the background, helping everything actually happen.

Yeah, definitely.

That's very much the theme of this podcast is to do something, to tell the

stories I think of those unsung heroes.

So anybody who's worked in a research lab will have some vague sense of

health and safety, but their sense of it is probably just oh, I have to fill

in like risk assessments or something.

Tell us a bit about what, what working in health and safety means.

That's, that that's always been the problem of it.

And when, back when I worked in a lab, someone suddenly thought,

oh, we should do some safety.

So we had this big folder of SDSs, literally, I would say

probably six or 700 of them.

And we had to sign to say that we'd seen all these.

What's an SDS?

The safety data sheet.

Oh, yes.

Every substance that you use, they used to be called MSDSs they've

been called SDSs for a while now.

But yeah, so you know the product data sheet if you like, of

like how that affects people.

And you would just sign the thing and every now and then you'd go, oh,

we're having a safety inspection.

So we would clear the lab up and we'd shut all the fire doors back up.

'cause we had the long kind of a long lab with various.

Rooms through it, which we used to prop the fire doors open all

the time in because 'cause you needed to carry stuff through.

Yeah.

And now that I work in health and safety, I know that is perfectly legitimate if

you are in control of the door and in an emergency you would shut it behind you.

So it's like we used to do stuff and kind of hide things from people.

I ended up doing safety stuff because I randomly, I was writing up my PhD. I'm

thinking about what I want to do next.

I would, I'd been applying to various scientific jobs,

so I'd been to AstraZeneca.

I'd been for interviews and Unilever even who have techie people that are

involved in making various things.

And got reasonably close to landing some of those jobs.

And then in a pub one night someone had suggested, I give health and

safety a go because I'm quite good at talking to people and quite good

at putting technical stuff across.

And they worked as an operational inspector and it was like, they'll take

you in and they'll train you and you didn't have to pay to retrain or whatever.

So you go, oh, they're fantastic.

So I got through that selection process and you then move into the real world,

and everyone's come across a risk assessment as a thing, but everyone does

it as a set of two tick boxes almost.

That's this risk is this number and now it's that number, and that doesn't help

anybody and it's just unproductive a lot of that, that it's it's so boring

and what you're actually wanting people to do is think about what it is that,

what is it you're doing and what.

Is there an industry standard out there that tells you

what you need to do about it?

So it's is there already a code of practice, like

putting scaffolding up, right?

Something that you'll see on every street.

They're always built the same way and they always look identical.

Funnily enough, there's a code of practice they have to

follow and it's that approach.

So yes, you use that number system and all of that, and that's usually

used to justify spending money on stuff 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.

So you've gotta get that past your finance 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 to what you're doing and write down the

stuff you're gonna do to keep people safe.

And that's as simple as it needs to be, but it's all a tedious form filling

that everyone thinks that's getting in the way of what I'm trying to do until

something goes wrong or someone's got a bit of ill health and then suddenly

you are looking back at all this paperwork 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, having attended one of our sessions, having

the equipment available in a nearby shed, but choosing not to use it.

Yeah.

Because it's just a two minute job and then the fallen out of the

bucket of a telehandler to their death 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.

But you didn't bother because you 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 the worst stuff that happens, so the scale

of the incidents are so much more than people have in other sectors, like Yeah.

Not long after I joined the chemical sector, we had an aerosol

warehouse that burned down.

So I was months and months in investigating that.

And that evening I found myself in police headquarters advising them whether or

not the plume of smoke coming out of this warehouse was likely to impinge on the A1

or the Great North train line and whether or 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 and that's where the organized fireworks

display was supposed to happen.

So they had to cancel all that.

'cause they were busy and half their fire engines were obviously busy.

Yeah.

And of all the days in all the world when you don't want the fire

brigade to have a lot to deal with.

November the fifth is definitely the one where you're like, wow.

Yeah.

So I ended up having a very long day that day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's as a result of that, we realized that aerosol warehouses

don't burn down in quite the sort of, it, it was always invis, it was like

a pop type uhhuh scenario that each individual aerosol would go burst.

Yeah.

And it would just immediately go on fire.

What you actually had was you could have buildups of gas at certain

points and get quite large explosions.

So we ended up doing quite a lot of different sort of policy stuff

in the background to look at how you store large quantities of

these types of materials because

obviously once they start Yeah, you can't put it out.

You basically just sit back and watch it burn for three days.

That must be really interesting with some things.

'cause there must be quite a lot of stuff.

Technology's moving on all the time, chemicals, products, all sorts

of stuff moving on all the time.

And sometimes it must be like that, that you don't know until something happens

and then you say, oh goodness me, we didn't think it was gonna go like this.

No, exactly.

And it the thing about the history of health and safety is that whenever someone

says, oh, it's health and safety gone mad, and you go, okay, then which set

of regulations do you mean here then?

You name me a set of regulations that you don't just read and think

actually that all makes sense.

Yeah.

And if there's a big regime that's come into being.

You can normally trace it back to something that happened

immediately leading up to it.

So you go, the health and safety at work act.

Why did that happen?

There was Flixborough and there was the Aberfan disaster.

They pulled the UK together into kind of there was two huge disasters

involved, quite large numbers of people.

And we realized we weren't dealing with the risks of those particularly well.

And that's how the health and safety worker came into being.

From formally the factories act.

'cause that only applied to factories.

Okay.

And there was nothing in place for members of the public affected by

stuff, which is what Aberfan was about.

Obviously there was a. A large pile of coal slag, which

I was gonna say was the landslide onto the school that Yeah,

that's the one that people have seen on the, episodes of the Queen that like 105

children died or something wild like that.

So yeah, when you scale stuff up to big sizes.

That's when you realize that's where all the regimes have come into place.

So for, so for example, the reason we have building regulations

of how you build buildings was after the Great Fire of London.

So it's yeah, we have to have a really big disaster.

And then we go oh oh well.

That didn't go well.

Why don't we think about that a bit better so that we design

buildings so that they don't have fire breaks and all of that stuff.

And, the more recently you can pull that forward to Grenfell where

obviously large buildings with an inability to fight those fires had

never really been thought about before.

Yeah.

So the reason HSE got that job is because we've been looking at chemical

plants and how you bring together different agencies to monitor those

kind of environments for decades.

So they're the obvious agency to then go we know how to do, we

know how to do this sort of thing.

Or how to pull the expertise together to 'cause that was the.

The great thing about working in that environment was there was always an expert

somewhere that you could call upon Yeah.

To go, we've come across this, we don't really know what, where we

are with this, and put feelers out to come up with a position on it.

To actually think stuff through from first principles or commission research.

Yeah.

The aerosol warehouse stuff, I knew that we'd done things like this.

They have a, a lab in Buxton where they can test things and do all sorts yeah.

Going back to your original kind of point when you're trying to assess something,

walking through a process and thinking about stuff as it comes up in a sequence

is often a good way of thinking about it.

'cause

Yeah.

And where are the points where you need to do something

and it's usually where there's a handover between one person and another.

There's a fitter who does this bit.

There may be a fitter that does that bit, but there's something in the

middle which you haven't identified that anyone has to do anything with.

So it, that's often how things drop through the cracks whatever it is,

there's some kind of process flow.

Yeah.

And people are really good at the main bit.

Making the thing, looking after the thing.

They're not really very good at deliveries.

They're not very good at getting rid of the waste.

I always used to start at the peripheral bits.

The bits you don't really care about.

They're the bits that are gonna catch you out and horrible maintenance stuff.

And like the main process is usually pretty well controlled

and people thought about it 'cause there's quality issues or whatever.

And you are measuring that because that's how you make all your money.

But it's actually thinking about the other bits on the back end where

you will have the biggest inroads.

'cause you suddenly find the stuff that's a bit unloved and not looked

after that's gonna let you down one random, wet, rainy weekend.

Yeah.

And you're gonna climb up a rickety ladder to try and get it to go again.

Yes.

you're gonna come a cropper.

Yeah, exactly that.

That is really, and it makes a lot of sense actually

'cause I think even.

I think in terms of any job, like you say, whether it's a factory or whether

it's like doing what I do, I might pay good attention to doing the podcast and

so on, but I don't always pay attention good attention to some of the kinda admin

things or the legal things or the things around 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 me in the couple of years I've been

back in that environment is they go it's, we are different to

industry because we're changing all the time and doing new things.

And you're going.

Yeah.

You don't know how industry works at all, do you?

Because,

oh, so yeah.

I was gonna ask you, what are the d the big differences that you found

coming into the university now in the

So people have this idea that a chemical plant, for example, is this dedicated

thing that just does one thing and they chug away, making whatever it is.

There are plants that do that, but they're becoming fewer and far between,

and there's a lot more like toll manufacturing where you say, I need.

A couple of hundred liters of this product.

And they will make that for you.

So they go through a management of change process to do that.

They go how do we need to configure the plant?

Are there any specific safety concerns?

What do we need to think about with that mix?

Set the alarms, set the trigger points, the, all of that stuff.

Universities don't have a much proper management of change process.

You just have some people, they apply for some grants, they win a grant.

They then go, I need a room converting to do this thing.

And they may or may not have consulted all the right people to know, do

you know what infrastructure you need to support that piece of kit?

Brilliant.

You've got a grant for an electron microscope.

That's fantastic.

Do you know how much the power supply is gonna cost?

It now needs to be in a temperature monitored room and it needs to

be in a dust free environment and it now needs an access control.

Now it needs to be a clean lab.

That's all 200,000 pounds worth of spend that you don't have that we're now

gonna have to find somewhere that you could have applied for in proper grants

if you'd thought about it properly.

And it's because academics aren't given the right training early enough to

go when you're applying for a grant, this is actually a project that you're

trying to build and these are what, what needs to come into that project?

Do you know, it's interesting this business of actually having

conversations, so I, in the world I work 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 you put the grant application in, we could

have properly costed for you to have, an animation or a website or a podcast

or whatever else it is that you want.

And it's so interesting that you're saying 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 is they're busy teaching, they're

busy doing the current work.

Applying for grants is time consuming.

And you get one in 10 of 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 to whether or not you're gonna get it.

They consider it difficult then to plan strategically to put stuff together.

Yeah.

But yeah, I am working on it.

Yes.

Because having been in a different environment, you can come to it with

different eyes to be able to go we haven't got an end-to-end process here.

Have we, we haven't thought about those elements.

If we can get closer to that and have my colleagues in estates and

facilities kind of areas more clued into when you want to cost up a job.

Yeah.

It's not, this isn't costing up a real job that's actually happening.

This is just that, a ballpark figure.

Yes.

In order to be able to put on the application.

Yeah.

So they go, all right, okay.

Yeah.

Because they didn't know that was a thing kind of thing.

So it's, you nobody knows stuff outside of their sphere of influence.

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, but most of it is efficiency related.

And so you, there's often a, like in a lot of environments safety and environment and

quality are often pulled together 'cause.

If you get the quality that you know you are doing good research.

Yes.

But that's so getting back to the point earlier of the main activity you

are trying to do, if you've put good quality processes in place to make

sure you make widgets of the right quality chances are the safety elements

will fall into place because of that.

Yes.

Because they have to Yeah.

In order to get the quality output.

Yeah.

It's repeatable and, and, within parameters and all of that stuff.

So there, there won't be any safety hazards built out of that 'cause in

order to be reproducible, chances are the kit is all properly thought through.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Makes a lot of sense.

So you've said there you told us a little bit at the beginning

about your journey into this.

So you originally did a PhD and then ended up, 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 a training program that you went into?

Yeah, they run a two year program to bring you up to speed and send you on a you

have to do a post-graduate diploma so that you have a similar level of level level

theoretical knowledge as folk out there.

But the, and there's specific courses on different aspects like machinery

safety and construction safety and chemical stuff and extraction and

Legionella and you, you think of a topic and I've been on course on it.

So it's a very, it's a very broad training to cover all kinds of eventuality.

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 technical experts 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?

Or, you pass it by colleagues and so on 'cause nobody knows everything from the

get go, but you very quickly get very familiar with, different environments,

but that gets to a point of tedium that like you walk in somewhere, you

glance around the room and you know what you're going talk about for two hours.

Like you just go that that, and that.

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, like I 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'll talk about the stuff as it comes up.

Yeah.

Over and above what you can see.

Because that's always my problem with people doing safety

inspections or that kind of thing.

It's just you are just looking for the obvious.

Yeah.

And it's mostly trivia.

Like a bit of tripping hazard here or a bit of whatever.

Yeah.

Actually having a proper conversation with people about what they do.

Then unearths stuff that you go, oh, that's interesting.

Not sure that's the best way to do that.

Yeah.

And then you can get into that conversation and and again, sometimes

that involves a large degree of spend, but actually the place is usually

thankful for your input because.

You've pointed something out to them, which could lead them to

financial disaster down the line.

Yeah.

Because almost invariably, if you have a big incident there's a huge fine.

Yeah.

There's consequences for 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 of most kind of incidences.

I always say to people, even if you're not gonna write something

down, say it out loud to yourself or someone else, and you'll go, yeah.

Does that sound like a good idea?

Really.

You're gonna stand in that wheelie 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.

Ah, what's the risk?

Why are you always going on and you go do you do know that 60%

of all fatal accidents are less than two meters off the ground?

Which is most of all of that sort of stuff

but that's always the challenge with the stuff is there are people

who are overly fussy and overly paperwork focused who drag it down

to it, oh God, why am I doing this?

Which then undermines the kind of the purpose of it for others.

Yeah.

That there are better ways or, everyone can be a bit jobsworthy sometimes.

And there's no need.

And it's that's not its purpose.

So there, there's often people are just told that they have to do a thing

and they don't really understand.

Actually, if you have that conversation of what it is you are

bringing to the party, they can then understand what they're doing.

And know when to ask for help.

'cause often people aren't taking shortcuts for, usually

for sometimes they're in a bit of a hurry or that kind of thing.

But often people are trying to save the company time and effort and bother.

They're genuinely trying to help.

In doing so have put themselves at a bit of risk and over time

your perception of risk changes.

So like I, if you or I tried to use a circular saw, I'd give you a push

stick and you'd keep your hands a good 30 centimeters from the blade

and be very happy that you still had all your parts attached when you

got a bit of wood to go through it.

Over time doing that several thousand times a day, you become

completely blase to that risk.

Yeah.

And I've seen people putting their fingers 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?

Yes.

And go, why are you doing that 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 doing it like that when the slight slightest

slip and you're gonna lose fingers.

Yeah.

And they don't go back on off saw blades usually either.

'cause they

I don't even really want to think about it if I was, to be absolutely honest

The expertise you pick up working in safety is a unbelievable, that's like

you've met enough people who've had surgery 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 areas where, I don't know, everyone thinks,

oh, God, safety, they're so boring, and why would you wanna do that?

But actually saving people from themselves is and feeling like I've

actually influenced that organization I was challenged once in a very well

performing chemical plant, and he'd say what do you think you bring to a job?

And I'd say, okay.

So companies often don't know how they're performing because

everyone lies to their manager.

Or you may have a bully or someone.

And the truth, we can't tell you the truth because you'll all start yelling at us.

So then you end up getting a consultant to find out why are things not working

the way we want who come around and famously just tell everyone exactly

what they already know and have been saying for years, but because it's

now from a third party, you can't shout at 'em and that's all great.

Where I think a regulator comes in is I do all that same stuff.

I find out from your people exactly what they 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 time scale that we think is reasonable so

that we get stuff done and sometimes that's quite expensive and the

company has a bit of a twist about it.

But ultimately you walk away thinking I've added value to that process in

that there's people way safer there now than there ever was before.

Yeah.

So it feels like you get that job satisfaction there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And and investigating incidents.

I remember a good, a really good colleague 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 for the thing that they've done, but

they've learned something from it and you've pushed them onto a different

paradigm and they all of those people will learn something from it.

The difficulty is trying to embed that in the place.

Because those individuals that's in them now.

But in an organization, you're going, yeah, everyone will learn

from that one incident that time.

But if you can embed that in the way people think about stuff

and why they think about it,

you've then made a better sort of 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 able to 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 you think I've now found how this has caused

and that might influence, oh, I dunno, 25 people around the world maybe but actually

I think I've had far greater reach and impact doing what I've done subsequently

than I ever did working that research.

That's why I wanted to escape that lab and just feel like I'm

sat just pipetting stuff around.

This is not for me.

Like there's so much more I could be doing.

And it does sound like what you've done has made a difference in

lots of different workplaces.

So I think as I like to ask my guests that if they had a magic

wand, what would they do differently in the world that they work in?

What would they change?

What do you think?

So I'll stick with the health and safety stuff.

What I would like as a magic wand would be that companies always act

in a responsible manner, rather than always push for shareholder value.

That they actually do what they know is the right thing to do rather than

get round things because they've got shareholders on their backs.

If you think there's a good example of that Boeing.

Boeing were famously brilliant.

Engineers were always in charge of their decisions.

They made really good, robust equipment and they had a great safety record.

And then because they were falling behind Europe the European manufacturer,

they introduced a new variant of a plane that they knew was unstable.

Rather than put a safety system in to, to solve the problem that had two

instruments and the computer taking both instruments, like readings, and then

taking action based on the pair of them.

Yeah.

Which is really quite easy to engineer and what the engineers wanted to happen.

They didn't want to do that because they'd have to tell the

regulator they'd done a thing.

And then, so they took the shortcut, which was just to have the computer randomly

pick one of the instruments and just believe 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 just chasing corporate greed and letting

the managers do things, which the engineers were desperate not to do.

Yeah.

So it's that above everything that you 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's going on with the water companies at the

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 and then it their infrastructure

has been rotting around them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's really shocking.

That feels to me like poor regulation.

Yeah.

And that's always what I always read into whenever there's a political

discussion about we need to get rid of all this red tape that is always code

for, we'd like to start like ruining somebody'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 deregulating something, you always wanna prick

your ears up to exactly what it is they're talking about.

Yeah,.

it's the bad press that safety stuff gets when actually, do you want people

to go to work and not come home in the same 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.

Yeah, absolutely.

Wouldn't it be better just to stop

time and money and everything else?

But that company doesn't necessarily have to fund the costs of all that, and

that's when you go that's not right.

I would say the take home thing I would want folk to take from this is,

yeah, sometimes the forms are tedious.

And you can always work with the person that came up with the forms

to go can we make this a bit better?

Or can we make it electronic?

Or can we do something and make sure we share stuff around each other so that

I'm not rewriting the same flipping thing that everyone else is doing.

But actually getting to the meat of that to go, what do

I need to do to this safely?

And thinking about the process as you go along is invaluable, and the

chances are if you've done that you'll get 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 whatever it is you're trying to achieve.

Yeah.

And I think that's what all any of us want, isn't it?

Do a good job, come home safe and in one piece.

Yeah.

So thank you so much for sharing all of those insights in your career story.

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 talking about, the evangelism part of it, I do

believe some of that is very good and useful and yes, I do talks and bits.

If folk were want, wanted me to do 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 pop that in the show notes.

Thank you so much, Stephen, for coming along and telling us all about what

it's like to work in health and safety.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.