Private paths

Phil Birch, a graduate from the first environmental health degree course at Aston University in 1968, has witnessed the profound changes in the profession over the last 40 years. The public sector faces spending cuts and as EHPs prepare for further changes, Phil recalls how different his own prospects looked during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“In those days, public health inspectors were under the control of the chief medical officer, who was a very powerful figure,” he says. “Even as a student I was being paid a full salary. It was a trainee salary not an inspector’s salary but it enabled me to have a car. I was one of the few students who had one.”

Now a lecturer in health risk management at Birmingham University since 2004, Phil says environmental health was not his first career choice. He was accepted to read medicine at a London medical school but turned the offer down because it would have meant “five or six years of poverty”.

Salary to study

It was his mother who told him that Leicester City Council was offering a full salary for students while they did a degree in environmental health. Phil has no regrets about his career path. “Environmental health is one of the most daily varied occupations that I have ever come across. It’s almost impossible to get bored.”

However, at times he has found the pull of new interests too strong, which explains why his CV includes spells working as a goldsmith and flying helicopters in the US.

Phil credits his environmental health background with opening many doors. “It amazes me how few EHPs realise the range of skills they’ve got,” he says. “They could be employed in almost anything.”

The credit crunch and its repercussions for regulatory services have prompted discussions within the profession about where it is heading. With other environmental health academics, Phil has been considering how to prepare the next generation of EHPs. As a lecturer on an MSc course, he has a good insight into the changes on the horizon. One of the biggest shifts will be a migration of EHPs out of local government into the private sector.

“If the Local Better Regulation Office (LBRO) gets its way, which it will, and if either flavour of government comes in, they are going to want to cut down regulation,” he says.

“The LBRO needs to cut down as much regulation as it can and at the same time provide as good or better protection as we have now. It looks likely that there will be a raft of regulatory services officers, who will not be as highly qualified as EHOs.”

Phil says the new skill sets will be lower than those of the current local authority EHP. People who want to remain in local authorities may find they have no choice but to carry out these tasks at a reduced salary or leave.

In response, he is insisting that the universities must train students so that they can meet the needs of the private sector.

“The other thing that is going to cause all sorts of interesting complications is the earned autonomy,” he adds. “What that will effectively be, as I see it, is lots of EHPs going in to the private sector and they will become the ones that do the inspections for this earned autonomy.

“The business will be required to employ a consultant in that field. It won’t be any old consultant. You will have to earn your stripes to get on to the consultancy.”

Earned autonomy

When the business receives a report from one of these “approved consultants” showing that they have met the required standards, they will then get earned autonomy.

“But that means they will be able to refuse access to regulatory service officers, except in certain critical situations, and that’s going to cause some problems,” he predicts.

As Phil ponders the profession’s future, he confides that his own diverse employment history was shaped by events largely out of his control.

After spending the late 1960s and the entire 1970s working in local government in Leicestershire, covering everything from housing to air and water pollution to infectious disease control, he moved into the private sector in 1980 and became a consultant, investigating civil liability claims for occupational injury or illness.

One case involved a woman who had contracted a hard metal disease on her lungs after inhaling large amounts of tungsten carbide dust each day while working on a machine.

Another was a man who became allergic to TDI, a glue that is often used to make shoes. “He got sensitised at the shoe factory,” says Phil. “He got it so severely that if the wind was in the right direction, he couldn’t walk by the end of the street, which is probably quarter of a mile, without having a violent attack.

“He couldn’t breathe properly. He’d faint and fall down. Most people don’t realise that most asthmatics have a problem breathing out normally rather than breathing in.”

Goldsmith’s assistant

Phil later worked for Colin Draycott Group as a group safety adviser but when the economy dived, he lost his job.

With no other consultancy work available, he was directed to a goldsmith in Leicester that was looking for an assistant. The stopgap became a year’s work for Phil, who learnt all the basics. “Somebody would have some earrings that they wanted to do something with so I’d turn them into a ring,” he says. “I’d make the gold into a ring because it’s got sentimental value and then put two or three diamonds in the ring.”

Phil impressed the workshop owner with his workmanship and was encouraged to register his own maker’s mark, which he did at Birmingham Assay Office.

He even dabbled with the idea of setting up his own shop but realised that the cost was prohibitive. “Have you got any idea about the amount of money that it takes to fill even a small jeweller shop window?”

In 1985 it was about £40-50,000. “It would probably be £250,000 now.” Fortunately, a post came up at Loughborough University, where he secured the job of researcher and assistant editor for a distance-learning project on environmental pollution control, which then led to a lecturing and tutoring post, running one-day courses around the country.

Eventually Phil soon got tired of being on the road. A recent divorce and the sale of a joint property meant he was able to fulfil a lifelong dream – learning to fly helicopters. “The description of being able to fly a helicopter as being able to juggle three balls while standing on another big ball in a strong wind is true,” he says. “You have to do about six different things at once.”

After gaining his pilot licence while still working at the university, Phil took off for the US in the summer of 1990 and worked for DME Helicopters for six months, carrying out fibre-optic surveys across South Carolina.

“Fibre optics is a very secure medium for transmission for financial information because it is very hard to hack into,” he explains.

“All the local banks used to pay American Telephone & Telegraph Company, the telephone company, to transport their data in fairly big fibre-optic cables and some of these went faulty.”

Phil points out that when this happened, it would cost the banks about $25-35,000 in compensation an hour. AT&T had a penalty clause with the banks and therefore didn’t want any signal loss.

“We used to have to fly over all the fibre-optic cable routes and see if anything looked amiss,” he says. “You can actually see the routes through the fields even 10 to 15 years after the cables have been buried.”

Sense of adventure

Unfortunately, the company went bust and Phil had to return to the UK where he resumed his academic career as a visiting lecturer at Loughborough.

Moving between the private sector and a number of local authorities in the Midlands, Phil took up his current post at Birmingham University, initially part-time while also working for Blaby DC.

“It was perfect, I could keep my hand in,” he says. “I could do inspections and see all the latest problems, which I could pass on to the students.”

While he admits that he’s settled in his academic surroundings, Phil has not lost his sense of adventure. For his next project, he plans to return to Japan to investigate the link between smoking and hearing loss among construction workers.

In 2004, he spent three months studying at the Yamasa Institute in Okazaki, where he gained a certificate in elementary Japanese.

He also discovered research carried out at Tokyo University and the University of Occupational and Environmental Health in Fukuoka that linked smoking with hearing loss.

“The Japanese smoking population is enormous,” he says.

“It’s 46 per cent in men. What I’d like to do is compare hearing loss in construction workers that smoke there with workers in this country. The best way to do it is with the same company, with the same safety rules and the same management.”

Don‘t rock the boat

One of the significant things that Phil learned about the Japanese is their attitude towards accident reporting. Accidents are often not reported unless they are too serious to conceal. “They have got this serious culture of not rocking the boat,” he says.

“Anything that can be concealed will be, rather than shaming the manager who hasn’t managed to control the hazards on his site. It’s worrying.”

That brings Phil back to professional changes in this country. Looking ahead, he predicts that in the new era of deregulation, insurers of usinesses and their health and safety consultants will increasingly bear costs when things go wrong.