MP: Paper shufflers in safety roles
More than $1.1 million was spent making health and safety inspectors redundant last year, leaving fewer inspectors than at the time of the Pike River disaster.
Despite vowing to increase the number of inspectors, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment offered experienced staff the option of taking redundancy if they did not want to sit a new test.
Those who did not meet the standards required by the test were also offered redundancy, or to be able to sit it test again in 12 months.
Figures released under the Official Information Act show 17 health and safety inspectors took redundancy under the programme during 2013, with an average payout of $67,000.
The redundancies came as the number of inspectors dropped from 146 at the end of 2012 to 129 at the end of 2013. Of those, more than a fifth have less than eight months’ experience, with 29 taken on as trainees since July 1 last year.
Worksafe, the Crown agency established to oversee reform of workplace health and safety, said it was on track to increase the number of inspectors to 200 by the end of 2016.
Janine Hearn, Worksafe’s human resources manager, said the Pike River Royal Commission and Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety showed the regulator had to ‘‘improve the quality of its work’’.
The strategy to improve was ‘‘about lifting capability first, and numbers second’’, Ms Hearn said, with the implementation of technical tests for all staff.
‘‘The net result of the programme will be a better trained and bigger inspectorate to assist meet the Government’s objectives of a 25 per cent reduction in deaths and injuries in our workplaces by 2020.’’
Ms Hearn said in one advertising round there were 2700 applications ‘‘indicating the strong job-market acceptance of the intent which had been well publicised of the ministry’’.
However, critics claim the changes have stripped vast institutional knowledge from the workforce, as experienced inspectors gladly took payouts.
A former inspector, who took redundancy last year, said the trainees would be ‘‘of no practical value’’ for at least two years while they learned about the industries they were monitoring.
Labour MP Shane Jones said the system was incentivising highly experienced staff to leave. He said he had been told the replacements were typically those who had office jobs beforehand, such as bank managers, who would have little or no practical experience in dangerous work places.
‘‘I can quite guarantee they’ve never been in a forest before. The closest they’ve got to wood is shuffling paper,’’ he said. ‘‘You cannot import expertise and imagine it replaces experience.’’