Health & Safety Executive boss Geoffrey Podger’s response to the Centre for Corporate Accountability report into workplace deaths smacks of complacency.

The centre’s report, which was drawn up on behalf of construction union UCATT, reveals an increase in the death toll on Britain’s building sites and a drop in the number of prosecutions against employers.

No-one – least of all the report’s compilers or UCATT – would suggest that every case of a death at work is the same or that prosecution should follow in every case.

But Mr Podger’s patronising response, in which he admits that all an employer has to do is put his firm into liquidation to avoid prosecution over a death at work, is unsatisfactory in the extreme.

An increase in the death toll of 25 per cent on construction sites is no small matter and the executive must have a duty to investigate a situation in which responsibility is so lightly dismissed.

That convictions over deaths at work is falling reflects several factors. First, that the executive has adopted a far more hands-off approach than of yore and, second, that the number of inspectors and inspections has declined as a matter of deliberate policy.

In a period when the life of working people is taken so cavalierly, to tolerate such an approach is to be complicit in needless and often horrifying loss of life.

The postcode lottery in death is a serious and disturbing fact of British industrial life. If, as the statistics show, it is three times more likely that a conviction will occur in the south-west than in the east Midlands, this can only be because officialdom is somehow working to differing sets of standards in different areas.

And to find that the life of a working person is ever valued at less than £5,000 is an insult of unbelievable proportions levelled at workers in this country.

That the executive’s chief can so lightly dismiss this report is symptomatic of an organisation which has lost its way and fails abysmally to comprehend the misery and distress caused by deaths at work.

To quote CCA executive director David Bergman: “The Health and Safety Executive must act urgently on the findings of this report. Systematic underenforcement of health and safety law following deaths leaves bereaved people without the accountability they deserve, and puts all of us at risk by failing to provide a deterrent to companies whose actions can cost lives.”

A lone piper’s lament in the Liverpool street where a Polish building worker died in a crane collapse will launch activities by T&G members today.

But that lament must not sound on its own. Cuts in the HSE budget must be reversed and the laissez-faire policies which it has adopted must be scrapped.

This new Labour government, if it has any scrap of decency left, cannot continue to treat workers’ safety as something eligible for cutbacks and economies.

If Gordon Brown had any vestige of the principles that should drive Labour MPs left, he should have marked Workers Memorial Day with an announcement that fresh resources would be found to slow and to halt entirely the brutal waste of life that mars our country’s industry. He did not.