16 JULY 1988, Page 21

See for yourself

SAFETY at work is on all our minds, and a friend from Imperial Chemical Industries was telling me how it was tackled by Sir John Harvey-Jones. When he took over as chairman, he made known his attitude to fatal or near fatal accidents: 'If anything like that happens, I shall see the man myself.' That to an ICI manager was a nuclear threat. Not even Sir John's steely will could avert an accident, but it could and did establish what would follow, and where responsibility lay. The right ques- tion to ask managers, when something has gone wrong (says my ICI friend) is, 'Did you go down and look?' I wonder how often, before that terrible night at King's Cross, Sir Keith Bright and Tony Ridley went down and looked.