Health Services: Agriculture
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps he is taking with Cabinet colleagues to improve health outcomes for agricultural sector workers.
Answered by Sir Stephen Timms
In line with its published Strategy 2022 to 2032, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) focuses on the most effective and efficient ways to improve the health and safety performance of all industries in Great Britain, including farming.
Many of the health risks agricultural workers face are common to other industries such as manual handling and noise and vibration. However, some are very specific to agriculture, such as pesticides or zoonoses (animal diseases which may infect humans).
Between 2018 and 2024, in partnership with the industry, HSE ran a campaign to offer farmers free health and safety training which was then followed up by an inspection to a selection of those farms invited to take the training. HSE will continue to visit farms where they have intelligence to suggest risk is not being managed adequately and investigate incidents in line with their published selection criteria.
As well as appropriate site visits, HSE continues to engage with farming through a variety of other methods including delivering industry talks; webinars and presentations; engaging with the media and publishing targeted articles for farmers; producing industry notifications which include health messaging; and producing awareness raising campaigns. It also produces an extensive range of freely available guidance to enable farmers to comply with health and safety law and keep themselves and others safe.
HSE’s commitment to working with the agricultural industry through stakeholders such as Britain’s Farm Safety Partnerships (FSPs) remains strong.
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