Baroness Kramer (LD)

My Lords, I am going to speak very briefly, because the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, has given such an effective speech, which outlines the issue, and the hour is late. When she first came forward with the proposal for the Health and Safety Executive, I thought, “My goodness, here is a body that could effectively deal with harassment and violence in the workplace, because it knows how to respond very quickly to situations that put people into an unsafe set of circumstances”. I suspect that, when the HSE was first put in place, sexual harassment and violence were probably considered somewhat acceptable, or they were domestic or private. They were certainly not something that an employer or workplace should be concerned about. Well, times have changed and we no longer look at it that way. It is therefore entirely appropriate to update the HSE’s role to take on these issues. It is very easy to see how effective that organisation could be in closing down both harassment and violence. It is a respected organisation; people in a workplace know that it will act and it will enforce. Those kinds of behaviours make a great difference to the whole culture within the workplace. So I thought that this was an ingenious approach, which I very much want to back, because we all want to stop violence and harassment and here is a mechanism that does that with very little change to the existing organisational structures, but by giving power and responsibility to an organisation that has the capacity to deal with the problems effectively.