“I hope we have persuaded [the minister] of the need to do more, not merely to reduce industrial noise but to help people who have suffered industrial deafness. I confess to having some direct and personal interest in the subject … I am one of those who has to pin his ear to the amplifier as I am partially deaf … I attribute this not to advancing years, but to my former industrial experience in the engineering industry.”
Harold Walker was a man obsessed with making work safer. As this extract from a 1983 House of Commons debate on industrial noise shows, the longtime Labour MP for Doncaster did not stop campaigning even after his greatest professional achievement, the Health and Safety at Work Act, passed into UK law 50 years ago.
