Blog of a health and safety editor

A very very hazardous pastime

2008-10-07T06:48:00.000-07:00

The airline pilots union Balpa has complained about a series of incidents in which people on the ground have been shining laser pointers into the eyes of pilots in planes when they are coming in to land (see here).

I don't subscribe to the were-all-going-to-hell-in-a-handcart view of society that would see this as just another tell-tale of bigger woes. But as an example of the pointless stupidity of a few creating risak for many, it's hard to beat.

At least when the Cornish villagers used to set up false beacons on the coast to draw ships onto the rocks, they did it because they were going to profit from the wrecks, what on earth would these people gain?

Construction fatalities: some kind of silver lining

2008-09-20T03:19:00.000-07:00

It's perhaps a statement of the obvious, but the current economic choppiness is likely to produce the reduction in construction industry fatalities and major accidents that industry bodies and government have made such a priority over the past year.

All over the country, construction projects are being mothballed, completion dates are being pushed back by two or three years (which amounts to the same thing) and housebuilders' profitability has fallen off a cliff (Bovis down 84% in six months, Taylor Wimpey £1.54 million into the red over the same period).

More importantly, retail sales figures show consumers shying away from bigger purchases, as they always do in a downturn. And if householders aren't buying fridges and flat screens, they certainly aren't going to be pressing on with extensions and loft conversions, which means a lot less activity in the refurbishment sector, whose small contractors contribute a disproportionate number of construction fatalities.

Obviously, the builders' federations and the HSE aren't going to take credit or comfort for a cut in accidents because of a cut in the number of building projects. Their focus is, as it should be, on the accident rates, which control for fluctuations in activity that distort the overall totals.

But a temporary reduction overall might provide some breathing space to arrange some of the measures they have proposed to help cut accident rates in the medium term. At the summit called by the then work and pensions secretary Peter Hain to tackle a 30% rise in deaths on building sites, the representatives of various federations and unions came up with all sorts of ideas. These ranged from health and safety information distributed at "point of sale" in builders' merchants, to complulsory safety passports for all construction workers.

But they were only ideas and, though there has been work on some of them since, they will take time. However painful for the contractors themselves and all the self-employed workers in the industry, a quiet period could provide some "swing space" to get better preventative measures in place.

The Safety Offences Bill in the Lords

2008-09-04T02:27:00.001-07:00

I've just been reading the second reading debate in the House of Lords on the Health and Safety Offences Bill (just to recap, a Private Member's Bill on higher fines and potential prison sentences for health and safety offences, which looks likely to get through because it has government support).

You get a better class of debate in the Lords. The Earl of Mar and Kellie (the title's from Fife) raises some points about the Bill, some of which are answered, but i do love his turn of phrase:

"...Thirdly, the Bill allows for the imprisonment of the body corporate, but it is not at all clear about how the human representatives of the body corporate will be chosen. How will they be selected? This reminds me of the wretched whipping boy supplied to take the punishment of the youthful King James VI in George Buchanan’s schoolroom. Fourthly, I can see considerable impact on minute-takers and pressure on them after each meeting to establish and record who had reservations about each corporate decision. Fifthly, is there not a better reality for corporate imprisonment? Rather than directors or senior staff being imprisoned, is not corporate loss of liberty in fact suspension from trading? Does the Bill not attempt to dismantle the concept of a separate legal persona for businesses? Sixthly, Network Rail has suggested amendments which reduce the imprisonable to those who are personally and identifiably guilty. Seventhly, Network Rail also points out that, without such clarification, someone who had not attended the trial could be imprisoned—a sort of contracted blame-taker."

Beastly injuries

2008-08-27T01:49:00.000-07:00

There's been a few stories this year of people being seriously injured by large animals. The latest is an ex-dairy farmer who won £60,000 compensation for being attacked by a cow, see here. It's difficult not to smile instinctively at the thought of normally docile animals being a threat (there's a kind of Keyestone cops folk memory of the policeman bending down and being kicked by the horse, or Carry-on characters being chased by bulls across fields, which is hard to shift and your average cow doesn't exactly look threatening) but the sheer weight of these animals can make anyone one facing one moving at speed feel like a very moveable object.

The HSE's figures show an average of 49 agricultural deaths each year from 1997 to 2007 (the headline stats are on the executive's main agriculture page ) and it looks like only five of those are due to contact with livestock. I'd be interested in the totals for less serious injuries. Might go and look...

Work at height prosecutions - the figures

2008-08-18T07:01:00.000-07:00

Dr Dave Merchant of http://www.uvsar.com/ who, when he's not scaling new heights himself, advises other people on how to do it safely, has been collating the figures for prosecutions last year under the Work at Height Regulations and sent me a breakdown of the parts of the Regulations the HSE has cited in the cases it brought.

The most common charge (in 46 cases) was a failure to meet Regulation 6, which covers the need for risk assessment, avoiding work at height if it can be carried out safely in another wayand using suitable control measures to stop fall injuries where the work is unavoidable. As a catch-all for what usually goes wrong, it makes sense this is the most common charge

Regulation 4 is next with 28 charges. This covers failure to organise and plan WAH. As Dave puts it, "People who haven't made any effort to even read the regs get done under 4.1 ". Most of them come down to accidents using portable ladders.

Interesting to see that only 14 cases involved a charge of failing to take precaustion where employees were working around fragine surfaces at height (Reg 9). I'd swear that we reported on more cases of employees who fell through rooflights and asbestos roof panels last year.

For those of you who know the Regs well, i'm including Dave's table below. He's written us some very very good articles on different aspects of work at height, including one on the dangers of caged ladders (a subject the HSE seems to have become quite shy about) which i really recommend.

Reg /Charges/ Title
1 /N/A /Citation and commencement
2 /N/A /Interpretation
3 /N/A /Application
4 /28 /Organisation and planning
5/ 2 /Competence
6 /45/ Avoidance of risks from work at height
7 /3 /Selection of work equipment for work at height
8 /12 /Requirements for particular work equipment
9 /14 /Fragile surfaces
10/ 6 /Falling objects
11 /0 /Danger areas
12 /5/ Inspection of work equipment
13 /0 /Inspection of places of work at height
14 /0 /Duties of persons at work - Special provision in relation to
caving and climbing
15 /N/A / Exemption by the Health and Safety Executive
16 /N/A / Exemption for the armed forces
17 / N/A /Amendment of the Provision and Use of Work Equipment
Regulations 1998
18 /N/A /Repeal of section 24 of the Factories Act 1961
19 /N/A / Revocation of instruments

Careful who you call

2008-08-13T03:33:00.000-07:00

According to the Guardian, the HSE and local authorities will be able to request internet service providers and phone companies to hand over records of email and phone exchanges as part of their investigations into safety breaches. The HSE and other public bodies will be able to ask for data that the telecoms companies will now have to store for a month under a new EU Directive.

They won't be able to access the content of the phone and email traffic, just the logs of who wrote to or called whom, to help them in their investigations.

It's the sort of thing that might be useful to investigators looking at a corporate manslaughter charge and would mean that any compromising email that passed through an ISP couldn't simply be wiped from the system and forgotten. There are enough warnings from lawyers about howmuch you should say in accident reports that might end up disclosed to an investigating authority, and here's another reason for caution.

The Guardian piece is here

smoking in the van: It's not a fair cop guv

2008-07-27T12:38:00.000-07:00

Lots of press coverage about the case of a decorator from Aberystwyth pulled over by council officials and fined for smoking in his own van, see here .

Obviously the papers are doing their usual schtick about the world gone mad, but it's a straightforward contravention of the smoke-free regulations which say that a work vehicle constitutes a workplace and smoking is prohibited.

Except that the Regs (paragraph 4 (1) of the Smoke-free Premises etc. (Wales) Regulations 2007, since you ask) actually say that a vehicle shall be smoke free if it is "used for work purposes by more than one person (even if the persons who use it for such purposes do so at different times, or only intermittently)."

But Gordon Williams the decorator, says he only uses the van himself, so I'm not sure they had him to rights.

Meanwhile if you want to see an open and shut case of someone breaking the law on smoke-free vehicles, there's one here (she's in a hire car)

Another day, another compensation outrage

2008-07-21T02:27:00.000-07:00

A householder in greater Leeds has received a compensation claim from a postal worker who slipped on his front steps delivering a letter (see here). The drift of these stories is always that there is a compensation culture gone mad, and fings aint what they used to be.

But is it so unreasonable for someone to take responsibility for the slip resistance of their front steps, especially when there are five of them). The fact that the homeowner says "no one's ever had a problem on them before in the 12 years we've lived here" might just be down to luck and doesn't mean they shouldn't have watched out for wear. Comes down to foreseeability i suppose. It's not that I think private individuals should be risk assessing every potential impace they or their goods could have ad-infinitum, i'm just irked (again) by the national press's assumption that they have a monopoly on common sense.

En standards below ... standard

2008-07-17T04:06:00.000-07:00

I hear the HSE is going to challenge some of the European (EN) Standards applied to personal protective equipment (PPE) such as fall arrest equipment, on the basis that they are inadequate compared to the British Standards.

Apparently, in some of the major EU countries the way you get onto a standards-setting board is by paying to be on it. And if you pay enough, you get to chair the board. So they are stuffed with manufacturers who are not always interested in making the standards too demanding.

The downside of free cycles

2008-07-09T02:59:00.000-07:00

An unintended consequence of the Velib scheme in Paris (which allows people to pick up one of 16000 bikes placed around the city and rise it for a nominal charge) has been a big hike in road accidents, see here.

Police are blaming it partly on the fact that the Velib riders are less likely to be wearing helmets and hi-vis vests, since it's often a spur-of-the-moment decision.

Presumably, many of them are also less likely to be regular cyclists (or they would have their own bikes) and negotiating Paris traffic is definitely an acquired art.

The two types of health and safety story

2008-07-08T07:43:00.001-07:00

Sorry there's been a bit of a hiatus on the blog, we are a staff member down here and it's been a frantic time.

Anyway, just been thinking about two streams of health and safety stories that run in the national press. The first are the ones that exercise IOSH and the HSE so much, that pour scorn on H&S as a disipline for being over-nannying and proscriptive, banning hanging baskets, conker games and so on.

The other strand is the ones about Personal injury claims against employers for unusual accidents, as with the case in the past few days of the school caretaker who has won the right to pursue a claim for £50,000 against Hampshire County Council for not training him to use a stepladder, see here.

What they never seem to comment on is the causal link between the two trends (assuming the first one actually is a trend). There are plenty of references to the compensation culture and how we are becoming as litigious as the Americans, but nobody seems to be pointing up the fact that if employers keep shelling out, or rather their liability insurers do, of course they are going to be more risk averse and be restricting anything not essential to their core activities (whether its educating children or making diesel injectors) that would risk an increase in their insurance premia.

There's nothing unusual about the mainstream press having their cake and eating it, but the HSE, in concentrating on the individual cases, as in their myth of the month campaign, might be missing a chance to draw attention to the bigger picture.

A spin cycle too fast

2008-06-17T06:27:00.000-07:00

There's a headline in Metro today: Why your boss may be a "cold blooded killer". The quote is from Dr David White of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at the University of London's King's College.

Dr White is publicising a new report he co-wrote which argues that HSE budget cuts and a culture of lighter enforcement mean that occupational fatalities are often underinvestigated. The report contrasts the total of 1400 work-related deaths in 2006-07 (excluding occupational diseases but including at-work road deaths) with the numbers killed through violent crime (about half as many), saying there is a moral panic about street murder while the bigger total is ignored or misreported in a culture of silence.

So far, so reasonable. The report makes some decent points, but White, who is on the board of the pressure group the Centre for Corporate Accountability risks undermining his own point by telling the press workplace deaths are "cold-blooded and planned more than street murders". Negligence is may be as terrible as viciousness in its effects sometimes, and there are moves to better recognise that in the recent corporate manslughter legislation and the current sentencing bill but the two are not the same thing.

The length of HSE's outreach

2008-06-10T07:17:00.001-07:00

The HSE is running a safety awareness day on 2 July in Lerwick for Shetland farmers and crofters, covering animal handling, dust, work at height, child safety and the use of quad bikes.

Attendees are promised "refreshments: soup and a filled roll". Which is only fair as many will have come quite a way.

Encouraging public whistleblowing

2008-06-02T04:27:00.000-07:00

Here's a sign typical of ones I saw on several construction sites on a recent trip to the US. It's the equivalent of the "How is my driving?" notices some hauliers put on the back of their large goods vehicles. Except that the 311 on this sign doesn't get you through to the builder's head office but to the New York city authorities.

Encouraging passers-by to act as whistleblowers for construction risks may not be a bad idea (in our coverage of the HSE's recent blitz of refurbishment sites, one of the inspectors said he had been alerted to unsafe roof work by a member of the public).

The only obvious drawbacks are that most casual observers won't know they are looking at a lack of edge protection or absent banksmen, or might call in things that aren't actually hazardous. Plus the fact that the contractors who most warrant this kind of attention are the least likely ever to put up a sign inviting it.

Promotional incentives

2008-05-25T04:02:00.000-07:00

Mining company Anglo American, which had 40 worker fatalities in 2007, has warned managers in its South African operation that they will not be promoted if the company's safety record doesn't improve, see here. The group's chairman announced the move at the April AGM. We've written a lot in HSW about incentives for employees to reduce accident records and even a few management bonuses tied to safety performance, but this looks like a very clear way to focus managers' minds.

Short of a Darwin

2008-05-19T05:33:00.000-07:00

I can't approve of the Darwin awards (so called because they are supposed to recognise a version of natural selection where people killed because of their own foolish actions remove themselves from the gene pool), because accidental death is just not funny even if the circumstances are potentially comic..

But one of the incidents shortlisted in this year's awards involved no fatality so I'm going to risk recounting it:

Kerry Bingham had been drinking with several friends when one of them said they knew a person who had bungee-jumped from a local river bridge. The conversation grew more heated and at least 10 men trooped along the walkway of the bridge at 4:30 AM. Upon arrival at the midpoint of the bridge they discovered that no one had brought a bungee rope. Bingham, who had continued drinking, volunteered and pointed out that a coil of lineman's cable, lay nearby. They secured one end around Bingham's leg and then tied the other to the bridge. His fall lasted 40 feet before the cable tightened and tore his foot off at the ankle.. He miraculously survived his fall into the icy water and was rescued by two nearby fishermen. Bingham's foot was never located.

Other foolish acts short of a grisly end are recounted here

Children and risk

2008-05-09T03:22:00.000-07:00

I was at the House of Lords yesterday for the IOSH honorary vice presidents' lunch (apostrophe after the s because there's more than one honorary VP and in fact two new ones were appointed at the lunch: HSE chair Judith Hackitt and the tory peer Lord Brougham and Vaux).

Judith Hackitt gave a speech saying she really wants to draw attention to the worrying signs that there's a generation growing up who will be prevented from going on school trips because they are perceived as dangerous. She was talking about a Channel 4 Cutting Edge programme a couple of weeks back: Cotton Wool Kids, which featured parents explaining why they never let their children out to play with friends and followed one mother driving round town with her young daughter pointing out passers by who looked like kidnappers.

Hackitt says she's woried there'll be a whole load of people entering the workforce who are either "risk naive or risk paranoid".

I half agree and I'll post some thoughts on the other half another time.

On a purely trivial note, the Houses of Parliament are breathtaking, the most impressive of Victorian gothic bling you'll find anywhere in the UK, all intricately carved woodwork and stone and handblocked allpaper. But the tented area on the terrace beside the Thames, where they hold visitors lunches like the IOSH one, is a far cry. It was church-hall chairs and Argos chandeliers and the walls looked like curtain netting. Food was good though.

Risk and personality

2008-04-23T06:25:00.000-07:00

I was talking to a senior safety manager at one of the big transport groups yesterday. She said they're starting a project to risk assess people's attitudes and personality types alongside the more traditional activity-based assessments.

They want to find out, and control for, some people's increased willingness to run red lights.

She says it'll be a long project and will only pay off over a couple of years if at all, but it fits with their competency based approach to recruiting people with the right aptitudes for any job.

I'm hoping we'll get a chance to cover it in HSW when it's a bit further advanced. In the meantime I'd be interested if anyone has examples of other organisations who've tried this kind of approach.

Smart lawyers

2008-04-18T07:31:00.000-07:00

I was talking to health and safety lawyer Stuart Armstrong of McGrigors yesterday about the way personal injury lawyers have become much more clued up in the way they pursue work-related claims. Where there has been an accident at work and the HSE is investigating for a possible criminal prosecution, the victim's PI lawyers will often wait for the HSE's case to be decided before taking their claim to court.

Armstrong says one neat trick on the part of the PI lawyers is to request diclosure of safety documentation such as risk assessments from the employer, and if they don't get it, to mention it to the HSE investigators with the implication that the company may have something it wants to hide in that area.

A new benchmark for fatality fines

2008-04-08T01:56:00.000-07:00

Ofwat (water regulator) head Regina Finn was on the radio just now explaining why she had fined SevernTrent water £38.5 million for misreporting its customer service ratings.

Finn said the penalty is 3% of Severn Trent's annual turnover and that it is "proportionate and appropriate" and will act as "a deterrent to this kind of behaviour".

The Sentencing Guidelines Council has been consulting since November on new guidelines for judges setting fines for corporate manslaughter convictions and prosecutions for fatalities under the Health and Safety at Work Act. Their draft recommended fines of between 2.5% and 7.5% of a company's annual turnover for HSW Act convictions, but there has been speculation that these percentages might be reduced to less punitive levels.

Now we know the order of magnitude of the offence of fibbing to a regulator about your customer satisfaction levels is a 3% penalty, let's hope the final advice on what it should cost a business to neglect employees' safety to the point of fatality doesn't set the bar any lower.

Harriet Harman goes protected

2008-04-01T04:47:00.000-07:00

So Harriet Harman feels the need of a stab-proof vest when she tours Peckham. Perhaps she lives in fear of Sabatier-wielding Labour voters rushing at her shouting "You robbed Alan Johnson of the deputy leadership!" or "This is what you get for voting for top-up fees!".

Sadly, the greatest risk she probably faced was that no one would recognise her, even with a police escort.

I have to report an injury

2008-03-31T01:29:00.000-07:00

I am a figure of fun in the office because I shortened my thumb by 4mm yesterday with a Stanley knife and spent several hours in A&E.

It was stupidity: I was cutting a piece of veneered chipboard with only an aluminium rule between the blade and my thumb (next time I'm using angle iron). But in my defence I've spent the last four years taking a whole floor of a house "back to slab" as they say in the refurbishment sector, remaking ceilings, stud walls and door frames and fitting a new kitchen and bathroom, and my dynamic risk assessments protected me pretty well up to now. Unless it was just luck

It certainly brings you back to what a great thing the opposable thumb is, though, being robbed of the use of one for a while.

Penalties Bill clears another hurdle

2008-03-28T02:31:00.001-07:00

The private member's Bill which aims to increase the penalties magistrates can levy for health and safety offences has just passed another stage on the way to becoming law. It's unusual for a member-sponsored Bill to get this far.

If it eventually gains Royal Assent without too many changes Labour MP Keith Hill's Health and Safety (Offences) Bill would raise the ceiling on fines in magistrates courts for breaching safety regulations such as the Work at Height Regs or PUWER from £5000 to £20,000 (the level they can only apply at present to offences under the Health and Safety at Work Act). It would also make imprisonment a possible sentence for this sort of offence.

The Bill has been around in other incarnations but all of them have failed at earlier fences. Now it's passed dicussion in the Public Bills Committee, it now has to go for report followed by a third reading in the Commons before it passes to the House of Lords.If it goes the distance this time it should bolster the message sent by the corporate manslaughter legislation that the law is firming up on health and safety offences.

HSC chair talks tough on directors' duties

2008-03-27T09:55:00.000-07:00

I met the Health and Safety Commission chair Judith Hackitt this week and she says she doesn't think businesses are taking the voluntary guidance on directors' safety duties issued by the Institute of Directors seriously enough. She pointed out that the HSC has said it will review the possibility of creating a legal duty for board members to monitor and manage safety performance if it doesn't think the voluntary route is working.

Getting your press release past an editor

2008-03-20T07:21:00.000-07:00

I was talking yesterday to the head of one of the big training certification bodies about how to increase the chance of their press releases getting into the pages of the professional press.

I thought it might be useful to set down the way it works for me, in case anyone reading who represents a commercial supplier was wondering.

If a press release is about some milestone for your company (millionth order, expansion into a new region, new product), it isn't material for our news pages. Put bluntly, it's very newsworthy to you but probably not to the majority of health and safety managers. There are trade publications that will carry that material as news, but not the professional mags. Apart from anything else, we get up to 30 releases of that type every day; we'd never have room.

But if you are just keen to get your organisation's name in the news pages, that's not so difficult. The trick is to give journalists a hook they recognise as news. It's a bit like tricking cats to eat their worm pills; crush up the corporate info and hide it in some chunks of appetising newsworthy information. I think i'll leave that analogy while the going's good.

So the fleet maintenance company that commissions a survey (and a proper survey, not just 30 companies) that finds one in three company cars is not properly roadworthy, is going to get a mention because that's a great bit of information to put in front of our readers. They look good for warning people, and so do we.

err, that's it.