The members will have received a copy of our written submission and I shall just go through it. The first question to be addressed is whether the safety and health of workers need to be protected. In 2008 there were 57 fatalities in the workplace and an estimated 129,000 work related injuries in 2007. The estimated days lost figure is in the region of 1.7 million, due to injury and illness at work.
The primary responsibility for safety and health at work resides with the employer. However, others have legal duties, too, including workers, suppliers, designers and so on. The Health and Safety Authority has statutory functions under primary legislation, the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 as well as statutory obligations and duties under the Chemicals Act 2008. The HSA promotes and encourages the prevention of accidents at work and motivates, advises and informs employers and employees on workplace safety and health and chemicals. It promotes the provision of education and training in safety health and welfare and enforces the law in that regard. We keep the legislation under review and as appropriate make submissions to the Minister on any repeals or changes that may be required. We carry out research and studies on safety, health and welfare at work as well as having a significant role in representing Irish interests at European level.
The HSA is charged with assessing the risk to the safety and health of employees and others arising from work. There is an obligation to have a safety statement in place and to have a safe workplace, safe work equipment and to manage work in a manner that reduces the risk to employees and others. The Act also places duties on employees to take reasonable care, co-operate with employers and not engage in improper behaviour that might endanger safety and health.
The Chemicals Act 2008 covers the administration and enforcement obligations for a number of EU regulations. REACH is an acronym for the regulation, evaluation and authorisation of chemicals. Other regulations relate to classification, packaging and labelling and detergents. These relate to the import, manufacture, supply and use of chemicals in Ireland and across Europe. The purpose of the Chemicals Act was primarily to give statutory expression in Ireland to the REACH regulation at European level.
HSA priorities for 2009 are to achieve improvements in high risk sectors including agriculture, construction and quarries as well as the provision of information and guidance tools to help micro-businesses manage health and safety. Increased numbers of advisory and enforcement inspections are targeted for 2009, at 17,500. The authority assists Irish businesses to implement REACH and related chemical legislation and we should like to see the integration of safety and health into all levels with the education system, to focus on workers of the future. We want to achieve increased awareness of workplace health issues and develop proposals for the simplification of the legal requirements along the lines of better regulation.
We are at an advanced stage in preparing a strategy for approval by the Minister of State with responsibility for labour affairs. A current strategy is in place for 2007-09, which sets out the priority areas. There have been significant changes, however, since this strategy was adopted and these will be reflected in the revised strategy.
The HSA has a chairman and a tripartite board with representation from employers, employees and ministerial nominees. The executive team comprises me, as chief executive, and four assistant chief executives who oversee the overall management of the organisation. The divisions comprise: chemical policy and services, headed by Dr. Sharon McGuinness, which deals with competent authority functions for a range of chemical legislation such as REACH, asbestos and so on, providing information and advice to industry; prevention services is headed by Ms Mary Dorgan and provides safety information, raises awareness and does a good deal of work on legislative drafting in the support of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and the Minister, as well as publishing extensive guidance for employers and employees; workplace compliance and advice is headed by Mr. Brian Higgisson and that carries out the field inspections and enforcement roles; and corporate services is really the engine of the organisation and deals with human resources, finance, information technology, board secretariat and so on.
The scope of the HSA is extremely wide and covers areas such as workplace safety across all industrial sectors, occupational health, safe and sustainable chemicals management and the transport of dangerous goods by road, which is based on the international agreement known as ADR. Its remit also includes transportable pressure equipment, storage of petrol and diesel and land-based planning advice, fishing vessels, supply of lifts, pressure systems, personal protective equipment, machinery, cranes and aspects of public safety in so far as they relate to work activities.
The authority has a sanction for 197 staff. Of these, about 100 are inspectors and some 15% of the total staff complement was recruited over the past three years in response to a Government decision to allocate additional resources to manage the role of the competent authority for chemicals. As regards the staff profile, some 80% of employees are university graduates and some 50% are educated to master's degree level or equivalent, and 15% are at doctorate level. We have a highly technical staff, covering a broad range of disciplines from all the engineering areas to a range of science disciplines, including toxicology and eco-toxicology, chemicals and virtually any "ism" or "ist" one can think of because of the broad remit of the authority.
The HSA head office is based at our offices in James Joyce Street, Dublin, with regional offices in Sligo, Galway, Limerick, Athlone, Cork, Waterford, Kilkenny. The Kilkenny office is also the base for our chemicals unit and essentially is where most of that work is carried out.
Inspectors are recruited based on their technical experience. They must be graduates in science or engineering, but generally they will have a minimum of five years commercial, business or industrial post-graduate experience. When they come in they are assigned to higher risk sectors and they must assess and report on whether employers are doing enough to promote safety and health. The authority's broad approach is to seek to achieve voluntary compliance, so about 54% of inspections will result in advice, whether verbal or written, and 13% or 14% will result in formal enforcement actions under the provisions of the 2005 Act, mainly. There are about 30 prosecutions each year, taken either summarily or on indictment in the High Court. In the execution of that role we work closely with the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. We also work closely with the sectoral representative organisations, the employer and employee groups and have close working relationships, either formal memoranda of understanding or close operational arrangements, with approximately 30 other State agencies and Departments with whom our remit overlaps.
The authority's grant for 2009 is €22.8 million as compared with €24.5 million in 2007, a total of €10.80 per worker per year. Of that grant €13.5 million is allocated to payroll, €2.2 million to accommodation, €1.2 million to information provision and €1 million to travel and subsistence, primarily in respect of field enforcement activities and servicing of some European committees.
In terms of output for 2008, we launched our annual report and statistics yesterday; 381,000 publications were downloaded from our website — our policy for the past approximately three years has been that downloads are free to employers and employees; our workplace contact unit deals with approximately 30,000 calls per annum from the public in respect of requests for information, queries, clarifications and accidents reports; we carried out more than 16,000 advisory and enforcement inspections and made 14 sets of legislative proposals to the Minister. We also represented the Irish interest as a competent authority for REACH and the transport of dangerous goods by road.
In terms of our international standing, while we are extremely small in terms of inspectors per head — we are the lowest in Europe — we believe we are effective. Accident rates and related absence in Ireland are among the lowest in the EU and fatality rates are about average. While not a league table, Ireland is ranked the third highest in Europe in terms of fatal accident reports and seventh in respect of non-fatal accidents. This is based on published EUROSTAT figures. We have taken several initiatives across a range of areas. We are audited periodically by the EU Senior Labour Inspectors Committee, SLIC. A number of external audits carried out by it provide us some referencing against European practices.
The question of whether health and safety constitutes a burden is a question often raised with us. We can demonstrate that the cost of workplace injuries and lost productivity is estimated to be 2% of gross national product, which for 2007 was approximately €3.1 billion. There are several reports in this regard. While it is difficult to get a precise and accurate figure, the band could be anywhere from €2 billion to €4 billion. The Central Statistics Office estimates that during 2007 approximately 26,000 employees in the public sector were injured or became ill as a result of their work. In addition, the State assumed a large proportion of the health care emergency service and disability benefit costs arising from workplace injuries. While there are many public service employers with excellent health and safety performance there are others, which we observe through our inspection programmes, in respect of which there is scope for improvement.
We had a number of successes. However, the primary success in this area is down to employers and employees. We are primarily a catalyst and a facilitator for this and are encouraged by those improvements. Areas in which we have been successful is REACH, the EU chemicals strategy. In terms of pre-registration, on the coming into force of REACH, we ranked sixth among all member states. We work closely with the social partners at board level and have formalised links with several State agencies with whom we have interests in common. An example is the Local Government Management Services Board, the Garda Síochána, the Radiological Protection Board, the Road Safety Authority and the Environmental Protection Agency. We have also done some work with the Disability Authority. These partnerships not only prevent unnecessary duplication of effort but can deliver real benefits. A week and a half ago, we held a joint conference with the Road Safety Authority which attracted 250 delegates and was helpful to our combined efforts.
We have been examining the possible impact of the economic downturn and have contacted some of our European neighbours. There is a belief that during the economic downturn there will be a reduction in fatality and accident levels and a prediction that when economies begin to emerge from the downturn there will be a sharp increase in fatality and accident rates driven primarily by an influx of new workers into the workplace and the re-entry into the workplace of people out of work for some time. There is a great deal of evidence to show that a person's first year and a half to two years in the workplace is a high risk period in terms of accidents.
