Letter to the Editor-in-Chief of Policy and Practice in Health and Safety

Sir, I am writing this letter at the invitation of Taylor and Francis to correct a misrepresentation of my views and a misleading conclusion with respect to my published work (Bellamy, 2015) on an analysis of occupational accidents from the Storybuilder database of the National Institute of Public Health & the Environment (RIVM) in The Netherlands. In 2017, a special issue of Policy and Practice in Health and Safety appeared in which the ‘Vision Zero’ concept of occupational safety was addressed by a small group of authors under the editorship of Patrick Waterson (Waterson, 2017). Amongst the authors was Sidney Dekker who wrote a critical paper on the Vision Zero concept (Dekker, 2017). There are three aspects of this paper that I wish to contest. The first involves a quote, the second involves an incorrect statement about my relationship to the analysis of the original data, and the third is about what my research allegedly shows and hence the position I am taking. This published paper by Dekker takes a quote from a paper by me in Safety Science (Bellamy, 2015) out of context. Dekker starts in the middle of my sentence but uses a capital letter, thereby creating the illusion that I started the sentence there. The text in the quote is actually my description of someone else’s model but Dekker presents it in such a way as to suggest this is my point of view. On p.4 he says (Dekker, 2017):