May 2020 Monthly Blog – What price a life?
On more than a few occasions, employees have put proposals to me for unfeasibly expensive schemes that would contribute very little to our company’s health & safety performance.
- For example, replacing the revolving glass doors to Reception with powered “supermarket-style” revolving doors (circa 2003).
- Or testing every employee as they enter the workplace daily for a range of contagious diseases (circa 2008 after a colleague returned home to India for tuberculosis treatment).
And yet employees plead: “It’s for health & safety” as if the total elimination of all hazards, however remote, justifies limitless expenditure with no regard to the company’s finances.
(And yes, these may well be the same employees who later zoom out of the workplace gates at breakneck speed, cigarette clamped between lips, mobile phone held to ear on their way to a TV dinner on the couch).
The first thing to accept is that peoples’ perception of risk varies enormously, depending on their background/experiences, and that something you or I might take in our stride could be perceived as a major threat to someone else – and vice-versa.
Second, is that people will tolerate a much lower level of risk from something externally imposed (such as workplace/environmental risks, food standards, etc.) than something under their own control (like lifestyle choices).
So what is the real key to assessing risks within a workplace, of deciding when sufficient expenditure is “just enough”?
The Dutch were probably the first to develop scientific ways of performing cost-benefit analyses of engineering projects when they needed to work out how high to build their flood defences. Clearly, over-engineering the defences would waste money, whereas skimping could lead to catastrophic loss of life.
Although many regard human life as “priceless”, the UK government today uses a figure of £1.8m as its “Value of a Prevented Fatality”.
Knowing this, engineering consultants can now use cost-benefit analysis to predict how many lives will be saved per £millions spent on transport, chemical, nuclear, etc. infrastructure projects. We can argue about the mathematics behind the £1.8m figure (the USA posits their own sum of $9.6m) but it can also be used to extrapolate the costs of major and minor injuries, how much to spend on health-care treatments, and so forth. So next time you are asked to perform a risk assessment, remember that finite resources entitle you to balance risk against the cost of reducing that risk to “reasonably practicable” levels. What it all boils down to is that safety and risk share the same common denominator – money.
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