It's easy to be wise after the event and to use a tragic death to score political points. But have you any idea how many workplaces there are in the UK and what resources the HSE have to inspect them? At this stage it is not even known if the man who died was at work - if he was not then there will be an inquest but the HSE will have no enforcement role.

Health and Safety can only be achieved through education of workers and management and the encouragement of a safety culture in workplaces. Inspection can be helpful - I have invited the HSE and fire service onto sites I have managed for their advice. I have a project ongoing at the moment where we have inherited electrical switchgear which we do not have the skills in house to manage correctly and are looking to contract in the expertise required. But enforcement will usually be too late and an enforcement only approach is bound to fail.

Your comments in your blog about spending more time on the internet than in the real world suggest you don't have that much experience of the workplace and even less of the construction industry.

Ignorant speculation about the causes of fatal accidents can cause great distress to the bereaved.

No, I've never worked in the construction industry (unless you count
biscuit construction), but the site of the first construction death this
week happens to be just down the road from my office, and I was emotionally
affected by this death. For some reason, I don't like it when people are
killed on building sites, even though I've never worked on one! And leaving
it to the 'experts' doesn't seem to be doing any good.

I'm certainly not blaming any individuals from the Health and Safety
Executive for either of these deaths. It must be terrible for them to be
going round the country looking at places where people died at work,
knowing that there just aren't enough of them to go round and check
conditions whilst the workers are still alive.

The government doesn't fund a decent Health and Safety Executive because it
would rather spend money on war, policing and turning the National Health
Service over to business interests. If enough people made a fuss about the
shortcomings of the HSE, maybe they would do something.

However, the underlying problem is the capitalist system itself, which puts
profit before safety or any other concern. If we get rid of the capitalist
system and organise production based on the needs of the working class,
there will be no need for an HSE.

The majority of the HSE's work is education, awareness raising (heard any radio ads about falls from low heights recently?), advice and research. Experience has shown this to be more effective in preventing workplace accidents. Enforcement is required in a minority of cases where individuals persist in unsafe practises after being advised of their mistakes. The majority of HSE visits to workplaces are by invitation - the expertise of the HSE can be extremely useful. Industry is not in conflict with the HSE as all well managed companies will realise that maintaininig a high standard of health and safety is good for business - accidents can injure and kill workers, damage plant and buildings and stop the workplace for considerable lengths of time.

The HSE has limited resources and the more it spends on enforcement, the less it can spend on education. Enforcement will always be too late, and can only protect those at work. Education can reach far more people and protects everyone. After hearing those radio ads you might thing twice about climbing on an unstable chair to change a lightbulb at home and use a step ladder instead.

Even in the socialist utopia of which you dream there will still be a need for construction and there will still be construction accidents. People will place 'getting on with the job' above what they percieve to be small risks (eg falls from low heights). Others may be unaware of risks and tasks which require particular expertise or may attempt tasks beyond their competence (eg if I took on the maintenance of an 11kV transformer and switchgear). And a minority of accidents are genuinely unforseeable - but there may still be things to learn from the following investigation.

The majority of safety enforcement is currently carried out by site and project managers. Would your revolution sweep them away, and what do you think would happen then?

I agree on that basic point. There are some risks whatever you do in life, that is an absolute given. I imagine that in a world controlled by workers and run in the interests of workers, lessons would be learned and applied across the board when a death occurred. If someone had died after falling from a low height, I don't imagine that people would stop climbing to low heights! However, taking the case of the collapsed crane in Liverpool this week, people definitely wouldn't be so high up in high winds, just because there is a rush to get things done before a corporate shindig (like the Capital of Culture). The full facts are yet to emerge, but when they do, workers should organise and refuse to work in conditions like those that produced the crash.

Since the HSE currently has very limited resources (purposely set low by the government), they may well focus it on education rather than enforcement. The problem is never individuals, but the system itself.

You state that 'Industry is not in conflict with the HSE as all well managed companies will realise that maintaininig a high standard of health and safety is good for business'. However, the establishing of regulatory were only won by workers after long struggles against industry. True, no company wants a serious injury or death on their sites, but since they want to maximise profits, this can lead to cutting of corners. Firms who break the law risk being caught, and are sometimes fined, but at the moment this is about as risky as working at a low height.

Families Against Corporate Killers do a some good work on this subject, and their website can be found here:  http://www.hazardscampaign.org.uk/fack