Focus

Focus Archive

Health and Safety: Is Britain going backwards?

Allan St. John Holt Memorial Lecture 2015
by Geoffrey Podger CB, Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London, and former Chief Executive of the Health and Safety Executive

November 2015

Allan St. John Holt, who died on 3 May 2007, devoted his life to improving the safety and health of people at work. He made a massive contribution to the professionalisation of the subject. As an original thinker, he was passionate, determined, principled and iconoclastic. He gave great encouragement to colleagues, helping many to move forward and expand their knowledge and contributions to occupational safety and health.

As a fitting way of commemorating his life and work, RoSPA together with the Royal Mail Group host an annual memorial lecture to provide a platform for challenge and debate and to stimulate fresh thinking about how to further reduce work related accidents and ill health. This year’s Allan St John Holt OBE Memorial Lecture was held on 20 October 2015 at Phoenix Centre, Royal Mail Mount Pleasant, Phoenix Place, London, WC1X 0DG.

2015 Lecture

Entitled ‘Health and Safety: Is Britain going backwards?’ it was delivered by Geoffrey Podger CB, Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London, and former Chief Executive of the Health and Safety Executive.

The lecture states that there is much to celebrate in what has been achieved by way of health and safety in Britain but that there are perhaps more questions to be asked as to whether we are doing enough to maintain and preferably improve on what is achieved, whether we are simply neglecting some awkward issues and whether we are really taking the right track in winning public sympathy for what we are trying to do. For more information on this interesting approach see Geoffrey’s presentation and speech.