• ON behalf of Camden Trades Council and Camden Unison, we commend journalists Dan Carrier and William McLennan for their extensive coverage of the horrific fatal incident at a Swains Lane building site (‘He lived for his family’, March 23).

The New Journal also merits praise for the accompanying editorial calling for tougher site regulation.

Such serious treatment of a workplace fatality like Stephen Hampton’s is only too rare in much of the media.

We also wish to extend our condolences to Mr Hampton’s friends and family in the wake of what we fear was an utterly avoidable tragedy.

Without prejudging the outcome of an ongoing Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigation, there were clearly serious, justified, concerns about site safety at Swains Lane prior to the events of March 16 which claimed Mr Hampton’s life.

As your editorial suggests, the last two governments have slashed the HSE’s budget, which stood at £231million in 2009-10, to a projected £123.4million by 2019-20. Allowing for inflation and the increased size of the workforce, this amounts to a real terms cut of over 60 per cent in a decade.

As Howard Fidderman, editor of the specialist journal, Health & Safety Bulletin, noted nearly four years ago, the HSE was already “overstretched in too many directions, with… further deterioration in an already worrying inspection and investigation record”.

Given the government’s ideological drive for lighter, “business-friendly” regulation, combined with its commitment to a “hard Brexit”, a gutting of the regulatory framework for health and safety seems only too likely.

Against this disturbing background, the work of campaigning bodies such as Hazards and the Construction Safety Campaign becomes all the more urgent, even as Mr Hampton’s tragic death makes the annual commemoration of Workers’ Memorial Day on Friday April 28 still more poignant.

GEORGE BINETTE
Camden Unison Branch Secretary & Camden Trades Council Chair
PHIL LEWIS
Camden Unison Health & Safety Officer & Chair of London Hazards Trust