HEALTH AND SAFETY FIRST

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: march/april 2024 :: RMTnews 18 Over 200 delegates attended RMT’s annual health and safety conference meeting in York which was held amid the campaign to prevent Network Rail’s planned cuts of £1.2 billion. RMT senior general secretary Eddie Dempsey warned that the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) funding for Control Period 7 (CP7) underlined Network Rail’s plans to cut over a billion of renewals funding in England and Wales and £315 million of renewals funding in Scotland when compared to CP6. “The union has launched a campaign to restore renewals funding before the Network Rail delivery plan for CP7 begins in April. “We have held days of action leafletting hundreds of stations and surveyed over 1,000 members who work in Network Rail in maintenance grades to expose the damaging effects of these cuts. “It is not surprising that we have discovered that there are critical shortages of staff and a rapidly declining safety culture and the knock-on effect of that is a rapidly declining state of safety for the travelling public. “We have got an underfunded railway that is awash with contractors and private spivs, we’ve got a regulator that to call ‘asleep at the wheel’ is too kind; they’re comatose! And that is a very toxic mix,” he said. Eddie emphasised the importance of the conference and outlined how the union was also working on other campaigns including working in high-temperatures, issues around toilet dignity, and staff assaults. “Frontline workers are also facing increasingly violent assaults, stabbings and attacks with weapons of all kinds and we are working toward an industry wide campaign group exposing how the BTP are under resourced and understaffed,” he said. He also spoke about the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act and how for the “last forty years the neo-liberal economic model that we’ve got is absolutely hostile to the presence of trade unions everywhere, absolutely hostile to the state-ownership of our public services and what that has meant is an absolute decline of one of the main pillars of upholding that legislation and that is the presence of a fully-trained Health and Safety representative. “If you do not have a trade union in your workplace then no act of Parliament that can really look after you,” he warned. Phil Liptrot, head of personal injury at Thompsons solicitors gave a legal assessment of the 1974 Act and its purpose and impact. Phil explained that he believed that the Act had become too fragmented and subsequently diluted by the proliferation of sub-contractors. RMT president Alex Gordon told delegates that union itself was born from a fight for health and safety at work, particularly given the carnage HEALTH AND SAFETY FIRST RMT’s 2024 health and safety conference warns that cost-cutting can kill