Stephen Britton, Health & Safety Officer (Episode 70) | Stephen wants you to think twice and stay safe
For this episode of the Research Adjacent podcast Sarah is talking to 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
- Connect to Stephen on LinkedIn
Theme music by Lemon Music Studios from Pixabay
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Stephen Britton: 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.
[00:00:15] 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.
[00:00:39] Actually, I think I’ve had far greater reach and impact doing what I’ve done subsequently than I ever did working that research.
[00:00:47] Sarah McLusky: 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.
[00:01:34] 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?
[00:01:47] Stephen Britton: Currently I do health and safety and biological safety at Durham Uni.
[00:01:51] 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.
[00:02:10] 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
[00:02:52] 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.
[00:03:05] Sarah McLusky: 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.
[00:03:26] Stephen Britton: 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.
[00:03:42] Sarah McLusky: What’s an SDS?
[00:03:44] Stephen Britton: 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.
[00:04:02] 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.
[00:04:25] 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.
[00:04:42] 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.
[00:05:03] 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.
[00:05:22] 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.
[00:05:38] 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.
[00:06:06] 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.
[00:06:26] 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?
[00:06:44] 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
[00:07:06] 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.
[00:07:24] 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.
[00:07:41] 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.
[00:07:57] Sarah McLusky: Oh, goodness me.
[00:07:58] Stephen Britton: And you’re thinking, and you’re thinking, wow, welcome to the chemical sector.
[00:08:01] 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.
[00:08:19] 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.
[00:08:41] 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
[00:09:01] obviously once they start Yeah, you can’t put it out. You basically just sit back and watch it burn for three days.
[00:09:07] Sarah McLusky: 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.
[00:09:16] 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.
[00:09:24] Stephen Britton: 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?
[00:09:34] 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.
[00:09:49] 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.
[00:10:07] 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
[00:10:21] Sarah McLusky: I was gonna say was the landslide onto the school that Yeah,
[00:10:23] Stephen Britton: that’s the one that people have seen on the, episodes of the Queen that like 105 children died or something wild like that.
[00:10:31] 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.
[00:10:47] 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.
[00:11:08] 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.
[00:11:28] 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.
[00:11:45] 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
[00:12:11] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. And where are the points where you need to do something
[00:12:14] Stephen Britton: and it’s usually where there’s a handover between one person and another.
[00:12:17] 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.
[00:12:34] 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.
[00:12:52] 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.
[00:13:09] ’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.
[00:13:19] Sarah McLusky: Yes. you’re gonna come a cropper.
[00:13:21] Stephen Britton: Yeah, exactly that.
[00:13:23] Sarah McLusky: That is really, and it makes a lot of sense actually
[00:13:25] ’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.
[00:13:44] Stephen Britton: 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.
[00:14:04] And you’re going. Yeah. You don’t know how industry works at all, do you? Because,
[00:14:08] Sarah McLusky: 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
[00:14:15] Stephen Britton: 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.
[00:14:23] 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?
[00:14:42] 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.
[00:15:06] 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.
[00:15:28] 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?
[00:15:54] Sarah McLusky: 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.
[00:16:04] 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,
[00:16:24] Stephen Britton: 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.
[00:16:41] 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.
[00:17:00] 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.
[00:17:42] Yeah. Until you pull them together,
[00:17:43] Sarah McLusky: start pulling it together. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:17:48] Stephen Britton: 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.
[00:18:06] 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.
[00:18:22] Sarah McLusky: Yes. Because they have to Yeah. In order to get the quality output. Yeah.
[00:18:27] Stephen Britton: 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.
[00:18:38] Sarah McLusky: 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.
[00:18:51] Stephen Britton: Yes. They’re a Civil Service Department.
[00:18:53] Sarah McLusky: Yes. And it And was that a, like a training program that you went into?
[00:18:57] Stephen Britton: 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.
[00:19:10] 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.
[00:19:25] Sarah McLusky: So it’s a very, it’s a very broad training to cover all kinds of eventuality. Yeah.
[00:19:29] Stephen Britton: 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?
[00:19:48] 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.
[00:20:08] 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
[00:20:20] Sarah McLusky: Just walk. Walk through it. Yeah.
[00:20:22] Stephen Britton: Yeah. Walk me through a process and we’ll talk about the stuff as it comes up.
[00:20:25] 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.
[00:20:44] 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.
[00:21:08] 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.
[00:21:32] 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.
[00:21:49] 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.
[00:22:35] 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.
[00:22:45] 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.
[00:23:08] 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?
[00:23:53] 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
[00:24:13] Sarah McLusky: I don’t even really want to think about it if I was, to be absolutely honest
[00:24:17] Stephen Britton: 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?
[00:24:40] 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.
[00:25:26] 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.
[00:25:51] 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.
[00:26:01] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. So it feels like you get that job satisfaction there. Yeah.
[00:26:04] Stephen Britton: 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?
[00:26:22] 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.
[00:27:00] Sarah McLusky: That’s pretty good. It’s pretty good to be able to say you’ve done that.
[00:27:04] Stephen Britton: 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.
[00:27:39] Sarah McLusky: 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?
[00:27:54] Stephen Britton: So I’ll stick with the health and safety stuff.
[00:27:57] 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.
[00:28:43] 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.
[00:29:05] 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.
[00:29:32] 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.
[00:29:43] Sarah McLusky: 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,
[00:29:50] Stephen Britton: 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.
[00:30:04] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. That’s really shocking.
[00:30:06] Stephen Britton: 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.
[00:30:46] 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.
[00:30:55] Sarah McLusky: Yeah, absolutely. Wouldn’t it be better just to stop
[00:30:58] Stephen Britton: 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.
[00:31:50] Sarah McLusky: 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.
[00:31:57] 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?
[00:32:08] Stephen Britton: 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.
[00:32:30] Sarah McLusky: 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.
[00:32:42] Thank you.
[00:32:44] Stephen Britton: Thank you very much.
