30 years on

Welcome to the HSW editor’s blog. I’m taking a few minutes out to write this from reviewing the first ever issue of Health and Safety at Work magazine (from September 1978) to mark the beginning of the title’s 30th anniversary year.

It’s an interesting exercise.The magazine was launched into the brave new world created by the Health and Safety at Work Act, in force only three years at that point, and was partly intended to help make sense of the Act for a health and safety profession that was still in its infancy, and still mostly made up of industrial safety officers - the IIRSM was only three years old and IOSH (which was then the IISO) had only 3000 members.

The HSW Act, with its new empasis on health and safety controls that were "reasonably practicable" and its extension of risk management duties beyond industry to all workplaces, has largely shaped the occupational health and safety environment we know today. But that was all still to happen in 1974, along with a raft of European legislation (we'd only joined the then "Common Market" five years before).

But once you get past the distraction of the 70s hairstyles, the old fashioned layout and some dodgy advertising that wouldn't pass muster today ("It would pay you to employ this attractive cleaner" runs the headline to one ad over a picture of a young woman, and another for outdoor showers features another female completely unclothed in a less-than-modest pose), what really emerges from the pages of our first issue is something more subtle.

There's the impression of a profession confident in the fact that its work was vital, if not always widely understood; a straightforward confidence in the necessity of safeguarding workers from harm. From today's perspective, when health and safety is so often used as a media whipping boy for failings which either don't exist or have nothing to do with sound risk management, it seems almost like an age of innocence.

But that's a reminder for us in the professional media that one of the useful things we can do is provide an oasis from all the unhelpful chaff, which health and safety specialists can come to for information that supports them in their day-to day work (which is as essential as it ever was) and a forum to learn from each other. Our aim for the Health and Safety Professional site is that it will do just that.

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