Thousands of people are dying each year because of the government’s failure to tackle food poisoning, health and safety breaches and pollution, a thinktank is warning.
A new report from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS) claims that lax regulation and weak enforcement are failing to hold businesses in check and are tantamount to state-facilitated “social murder”.
The report, by Professor Steve Tombs, head of social policy and criminology at the Open University, claims that some 29,000 deaths in the UK are attributable to airborne pollution alone. A further 50,000 people die as a result of injuries or health problems originating in the workplace. Each year food poisoning results in 20,000 people being hospitalised and 500 deaths.
While stressing that the figures are probably underestimates, the report claims that many of the deaths would be largely avoidable if the government promoted a more robust regulatory environment.
It argues that successive governments have undermined the independent inspection of businesses over many years, with damaging consequences for public health. A typical business can now expect a local authority health and safety inspection just once every 20 years, the report points out. Between 2004 and 2013, there were 34% fewer food standards inspections and 28% fewer prosecutions; 53% fewer health and safety inspections and 40% fewer prosecutions; and 56% fewer environmental health inspections and 40% fewer prosecutions.
“This is not about rules, regulations and red tape,” Tombs said. “It is about lives lost and shortened and the health of communities, workers and consumers made poorer. This is avoidable business-generated, state-facilitated social murder. And quite remarkably it proceeds daily, met largely by political silence.”
A shift towards self-regulation and the use of private firms to carry out regulatory work once overseen by public bodies are blamed for a softening of the regulatory environment. Research by the New Economics Foundation for the TUC has found that 44% of local government expenditure on environmental and regulatory services now goes to external contractors, resulting in what Tombs suggests is “the transformation of a system of social protection which, for all of its limitations, has existed in the UK since the 1830s”.
He cites the diesel emissions scandal engulfing Volkswagen and other car manufacturers and the recent furore over horsemeat in the food chain as evidence that businesses “cannot simply be trusted to act in the public interest without robust, independent, state-backed regulation”.
The report’s publication comes amid heightened concern over the government’s commitment to tackling environmental health issues.
Last week the Commons environment committee attacked the government for failing to tackle pollution. It warned that 40,000-50,000 premature deaths a year in the UK were caused by a failure to adequately tackle cardiac, respiratory and other diseases linked to air pollution. It called for clean air zones – currently being introduced in London, Leeds, Birmingham, Nottingham, Derby and Southampton, targeting drivers of high-polluting vehicles – to be extended to more cities in England.
Will McMahon, deputy director of the CCJS, said that tackling public health issues was not being made a sufficient priority because it was an easy target for cutbacks.
“The public is led to believe the greatest harms faced by citizens are dealt with by the police and courts,” McMahon said. “Professor Tombs makes clear that this is far from the case. The harms he writes about are not random happenings but the result of political and economic decisions. Policymakers need to urgently address the radical reduction in local authority inspections and enforcement.”
A spokesman for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said the government was committed to improving public health.
“Improving air quality is a priority for this government and that is why last year we published plans setting out a new programme of clean air zones which, alongside national action to encourage uptake of low emission vehicles and continued investment in clean technologies, will create cleaner, healthier air for all.”
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