Andy Farrall seeks to raise understanding of health and safety, prompted by the article in October’s issue featuring John Hamilton, head of health and safety at Bradford and Bingley.
I now work as a health and safety consultant, but before changing careers I spent 16 years in public law enforcement and private security. In the latter years I was an instructor teaching the SITO four-day security officer course, and it worried me that just two and a half hours of the official syllabus was devoted to Health and Safety at Work. That’s not a lot for such a complex subject. However, because I believe passionately in the importance of health and safety, I always made it clear to students that health and safety was not just something for managers to worry about. It affects everybody, and everybody has their part to play. But I wonder how many students actually believed me?
Good old days?
Let me go a bit further, how many of the supervisors and managers I trained continue to do things in the "good old way" – asking guards to do 24-hour continuous shifts; putting staff onto a new job with no site-specific training; failing to keep assignment instructions up to date? Or have all these bad practices stopped? I hope so – because they are illegal. Having worked in manned guarding I know that it is highly competitive with narrow margins, and there is a temptation to cut corners if the contract is to be won. But make no mistake – such excuses will cut no ice if something happens and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE; or the local authority) prosecutes for a breach of health and safety legislation. To make a point I’m going to quote a personal incident which happened to me a few years ago when I worked as a guard – and to prevent red faces I will not identify the security company or their client.
Slip in rain
The client was a large distribution centre for frozen food and part of the guard’s job was to do two-hour patrols and check the temperatures of the 40-foot reefer trailers. That was easy because the fridge units were on the outside. Then a fleet of 17-ton lorries was brought into use. These vehicles were locked after loading and, since they were one-man operated, the temperature gauges were inside the locked cab. The only way to check them was to perch precariously from the mirror with one foot on the wheel and shine a torch through the window. Doing this one Saturday afternoon in the pouring rain I slipped off the tyre and landed flat on my back on the concrete yard. I was on my own, the site was closed until Monday morning, and I was lying unconscious in the cold and rain, hidden from view by the other vehicles. Having made a check call just before I started my rounds it would be hours before anybody realised something was wrong and I needed help. Luckily my injuries weren’t serious, apart from a headache, but let’s look at some of the ways the guarding company had breached health and safety legislation:
l No risk assessment had been done for that specific check procedure
l The assignment instructions for the site made no mention of checking these vehicles; that is, there was no written method statement
l Even with check calls being made at two2-hour intervals there would have been an appreciable time delay before anybody realised I was in trouble and sent help – so if my injuries had been more serious I could have died before assistance arrived.
What does the law say?
l The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations stipulate that a written risk assessment must be drawn up before the task starts and that appropriate training must be provided – neither requirement was met.
l The Health and Safety at Work Act requires employers to provide safe systems of work. Hanging off truck mirrors isn’t safe, and neither is a check system that could take hours to summon help.
l And if the incident were to happen today they would also be in breach of the new Working at Height Regulations.
The offences identified above could have resulted in a very heavy fine for the guarding company, but what would have happened if I had died? Note that HSE statistics [INDG395] show that about 700 people a year are killed or seriously injured through falling from vehicles. It is feasible that the contract manager who told me to go climbing on trucks, and who neglected to carry out a risk assessment or provide specific training, could have faced a personal prosecution for manslaughter resulting from gross negligence. If convicted he could have been given an immediate custodial sentence. But health and safety is not just about accidents; fundamentally it is about keeping staff safe and well and taking care of them.
Care
Do you take care of your staff? For example: how user-friendly are your shift patterns? Can you cope with a site going down through illness, or do you (say) rely on staff extending their shift at very short notice until a relief arrives (if a relief arrives)? Working long hours (the rostered 60-hour week of olden times) and extended shifts is unhealthy since it quickly leads to fatigue which in turn leads to stress. HSE statistics for 2004-5 show that 245,000 people developed stress-related conditions in that year alone, with a further 56,000 people developing work-related heart disease in the same period. You have a legal obligation to both assess the risk of stress to your employees and to put effective controls into place to minimise that stress – but you should do that as a matter of course. Qualified staff are an expensive asset and it is simply common sense to look after them properly. I know health and safety seems complicated, apparently designed to obstruct people trying to make an honest living, but the reality is that it’s about keeping people alive in the workplace – which isn’t such a bad idea. One final point: all companies are legally obliged to enlist the help of a competent person to provide health and safety advice, be that a qualified member of staff or an external consultant. If you decide to use a consultant may I suggest you choose somebody who actually understands how your industry works?
About the author
Andy Farrall is SHE Consultant at Bristol-based Logic SHE Solutions Ltd.
