May 8, 2012

Article published in the Safety Practitioner May 2012

Article published in the Safety Practitioner May 2012

It’s only just begun

Faced with dramatic political challenges and the worst economic crisis in recent memory the health and safety profession is on the defensive. It needs to respond by looking to the future and learning to communicate with the emerging generations using methods and language they understand. Practitioners must develop the knowledge and skills to communicate effectively with all those involved in, or affected by, them and their work.

To read the full article please look at the ‘Published Articles’ tab above or click this link

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April 6, 2012

Cameron’s pledge to tackle “health and safety monster” will only save businesses an average of 5p each.

After claims that changes to health and safety rules will save “thousands of hours of form filling each year”, Cameron’s pledge to tackle Britain’s “health and safety monster” has quite rightly been ridiculed.

Chris Grayling, the employment minister, yesterday hailed the new rules for “bringing common sense back to health and safety”, as companies will no longer have to report the most minor injuries suffered by their employees.
“We are freeing them from the burdens of unnecessary bureaucracy, while making sure serious incidents are properly investigated,” he said.

However, the total savings per year are just £243,000 spread between the UK’s 4.5 million companies – the equivalent of just 5p each.

John Longworth, director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said
“Extending the Reporting of Injurious, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences time to seven days is a welcome step in the right direction, as it will go some way to reducing the administrative burden many businesses face when dealing with health and safety regulation,” he said.
“However, the government’s own figures show that this will only save firms £240,000 annually, which in the grand scheme of things, is tiny.

The changes resulted from the Common Sense, Common Safety report by Lord Young of Graffham, who conducted a review into the UK’s health and safety rules two years ago. David Cameron has since then promised to “tackle the health and safety monster” strangling British business with red tape.
The latest changes means companies will only have to report minor injuries that happen at work if the staff member has to take at least seven days off work. Employers will also have 15 days, rather than 10 days to report each incident to the Health and Safety Executive. The Government estimates this will lead to just 30,000 fewer reports a year, suggesting the extra paperwork is not a burden for millions of businesses.
Companies will still have to keep a written record of all injuries resulting in at least four days off work, even if they do not have to be reported to the authorities.
.

For the full article published in the Daily Telegraph see
Government Cuts result in average savings of 5p per company!!

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April 4, 2012

Prosecution over Grayrigg crash

Network Rail was today fined £4m over crash which occurred when a train derailed while travelling over the points at 92mph resulting in the death of an 84-year-old Glasgow woman and injury of 88 people. In November, an inquest jury found poorly-maintained points were to blame for causing her death. The Office of Rail Regulation said: “This results from the company’s failure to provide and implement suitable and sufficient standards, procedures, guidance, training, tools and resources for the inspection and maintenance of fixed stretcher bar points.” The stretcher bars keep moving rails a set distance apart.

The fine together with costs of £118,037 will be paid by the taxpayer!

Network Rail was found guilty under section 3(1) of the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act last month.

The judge said if convicted after trial the penalty would have been £6m but credit was given for the guilty plea.

BBC reported in November 2011 how David Lewis, an engineer with the company, broke down in tears at the inquest when he told the Kendal hearing he had forgotten to inspect the points near where the crash happened. He said he was “under pressure” when he failed to check a section of the rail line five days before the derailment. He told the inquest he felt like a man “spinning plates on sticks”. His colleague Paul Wills, an assistant track section manager, told the inquest that staff had to put up with “bully-boy” management. They also heard how Mr Lewis and his team were under-staffed, with workers not given the right tools or enough time to carry out checks. Mr Lewis, who has since left Network Rail, had already warned his bosses about the “shambles”, the jury was told. The Coroner said it was a “tragic irony” that the man who tried to flag up the problems was the man who missed the points-check days before the derailment.

Following this prosecution the director of railway safety at the Office of Rail Regulation, Ian Prosser, said: “The derailment near Grayrigg was a devastating and preventable incident which has had long-term consequences for all involved.

Network Rail chief executive David Higgins described the crash as a “terrible event”.
He said: “Within hours it was clear that the infrastructure was at fault and we accepted responsibility, so it is right that we have been fined.

Network Rail was previously fined £3m for the Potters Bar crash in which seven people died. That crash, in 2002, also involved safety breaches at a faulty set of points.

Based on BBC news report 4th April 2012

Posted in Business Benefits, death at work, duty of care, Fines, health & safety, health and safety, HSE, Major Disasters, rail, safety, safety consultant, safety management | Leave a Comment »

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March 31, 2012

Does health and safety need to move on? – Part one

This is the first of a series of articles based on an article published in SHP Magazine in 2011. The articles will be amended to reflect developments since it was originally published. Sign up to my blog for notification of when parts 2 and 3 are published.

For the past few years we have been under constant pressure and attack by the government and the media. I think it is time for the profession to move on by facing the challenges head on. The health and safety brand needs to change and we all have a role in achieving this. In a depression no one is spared the harsh realities of the economic crisis, but cutting costs must not translate into cutting corners in keeping people at work healthy and safe. In these uncertain times we need to demonstrate that we are up to the challenge of delivering services that offer real value. Health and safety can’t sit in the corner licking its wounds waiting for the challenge to go away. The challenge strikes at the very root of what we do and what we are trying to achieve. Navel gazing will not move the profession forward, we need a new outlook. So what does that mean in practice?

Technical Specialists

One of the most fundamental changes is the need to move away from a passive technical service to a more active partnership with the client. It is not just about raising the profile of health and safety but about providing a clearer understanding of what the service is trying to achieve and how that contributes to the organisations objectives. The profession needs to be less focused on the technical aspects of the job and take a wider more business focused perspective. As technical specialists, practitioners are often involved in a fairly passive exchange of information and advice. They try to take a holistic approach, but do they really take the time to stand back and reflect on the whole collection of services they deliver?

Active Partnership

Practitioners need to realise that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to service delivery, particularly in large and complex organisations, and develop the expertise required to identify and deal with a variety of customer demands. They need courage, tenacity, experience and ability to work on their own initiative and deliver services that the client needs to survive. The common approach to Auditing provides a prime example of how we need to change. Non-compliance is often identified as a local fault, but an effective system should alert managers that something is systemically wrong. This illustrates the importance of evaluating audit outcomes to identify the trends and any overall improvements to the safety management system. To be more effective, when we audit and find significant issues in a service, we need to provide support with the action required to rectify the problem. Real effective implementation of the changes required to address many health and safety problems is not easy and managers often fail to address the root cause. At first, this change of approach may be difficult because health and safety is not about identifying the non compliance and walking away. Good health and safety professionals have never done this anyway! It’s about understanding the context, working with managers, supervisors and staff in the workplace, it’s about being hands on but with the objective of improving the systems, understanding the behavioural issues and acknowledging the financial constraints.

It’s not just about senior managers!

Practitioners often see organisations as command and control hierarchies; if the boss says something is important then everyone will follow. Its is crucial to get senior managers on board, but it’s only part of the picture. A related problem in large organisations is that we often have more than one client to satisfy. Senior managers, for example, seek assurance that the organisation is compliant with legal requirements, while local managers are looking for a more hands-on support. We have to design service delivery to suit our organisations and deliver clearly defined outcomes that managers at levels buy into.

It’s not just about legal compliance

While the legal argument is compelling, managers also need to understand that failure to control health and safety risks properly can have a damaging effect on the business. Practitioners need to be more effective at communicating this message to managers, by using more sophisticated business arguments to justify changes to the way that safety is managed. The arguments need to relate to risk, opportunity and efficiency as part of an overall approach to corporate governance. To achieve this, practitioners need to develop an active-partnership approach.
I will be exploring what this means in future postings.

This post is based on an article first published in the Safety and Health Practitioner in 2011 to support a presentation to the IOSH Conference 2011 http://www.shponline.co.uk/features-content/full/iosh-11-clearing-the-decks

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March 25, 2012

Post Löfstedt – Is David Cameron unsafe in the workplace?

We have all heard how David Cameron plans to “tackle the health and safety monster”. As a long standing and passionate health and safety professional I have been too angry to respond to such rubbish until now. Having cooled off a little I would like to make some comments by way of a response.

The starting point for many will be to ask what he really knows about any workplace where health and safety is likely to be a significant issue. The only industrial workplaces he has ever been in are likely to be ones that have been scrubbed and polished for a ‘royal’ visit. Outside of politics the nearest he has been to a workplace was 7years as Head of Corporate Communications at Carlton TV, where he travelled round the world with the firms boss. Tempting as it is to quote some of the things that staff around him at the time have said about this I will leave it to you to read if you want to at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8661964.stm. But that’s not the biggest weakness in his argument!

He talks about safety being over the top in state schools. Some would argue that, as an Eton boy, what does he know about the education that most people receive. The nearest he came to an accident was when he sprained his ankle dancing to bagpipes on a trip to Rome! I have never been in a school that wrapped kids in cotton wool. I think this is not only a slur on health and safety but on the professionalism of the teaching profession. I have been asked about the myths around health and safety, as quoted by such wonderful newspapers as the Daily Mail, but usually from the perspective of this can’t be true. Its the media that peddle half trues and lies about health and safety, as they do about so many other things. What we do know is that kids come into the workplace, not only with little practical experience of the most basic things they need to do, but with little or no real knowledge of health and safety. Health and safety seems to be cited as the reason why practical work is not as involving as it used to be. But how can that be? My experience of bringing up three sons is that school is more challenging than ever. There’s more expected of kids now than when I was at school, it’s more interesting, it’s at an higher level and they are under so much pressure to achieve its unbelievable. So his argument about overbearing health and safety in education seems weak. But thats not the biggest weakness in his argument!

So what about the health and safety profession? Is it full of over prescriptive, over bearing out of touch professionals who are banning conkers? My answer can only be based on my experience. If you do your job properly then you just don’t have time to go about banning conkers, even if you wanted to. The reality is that, if you are working closely with managers, helping them deal with the often difficult and complex risk decisions that they need to make then you don’t have time to focus on the trivial….you have to discount it. Good managers are focused on delivering quality, efficiency and profit or good value. We have to help managers balance risk against the apparent needs of the organisation, otherwise we just lose the respect of the people we work for and with. Usually that means, pragmatic and sensible interpretation of legislation. I pride myself on the reaction I sometimes get from managers when I advise them that they often have to accept a degree of risk at work but obviously need to do that in a structured way, based on assessment. I want managers to be challenging. I hate to hear talk of compliance for compliance sake and challenge that wherever I find it. So my experience of health and safety is very different to that of David Cameron. But that’s not the biggest weakness in his argument!

The main weakness for me is when he talks about health and safety hampering business growth! He presents no examples to back up his argument other than the usual bonkers conkers stuff cooked up by the Daily Mail. As health and safety professionals we see the opposite. We see organisations that are keen on health and safety because of the economic benefits. They understand the significant cost incurred when someone is injured or made ill at work.
Good, sensible health and safety helps people to manage risk. It helps employers ensure staff are safe and well. It reduces absenteeism and staff turn-over and supports productivity and profitability. When done properly, it saves businesses money.

The bottom line is that misconceptions about health and safety are born not from its laws, but from the misapplication and misinterpretation of those laws, and misreporting by journalists.

The main problem for Cameron, not that it will stop him, is that the independent report by Professor Ragnar Löfstedt didn’t support his argument. It did recommend change but it was sensible and measured change over a reasonable period of time. Cameron intends to plough ahead irrespective of what the expert he appointed has told him. He tells us this process will be all but over by the end of 2012!

I dread to see the state of health and safety in this country should Cameron’s philosophy be fully applied. The culture he is likely to create amongst business and it’s managers by the language he is using about health and safety is really worrying and needs to be countered sharply by the profession.

I’m a pragmatic, practical, sensible and realistic health and safety professional who supports the businesses that I work for and enables them to achieve their outcomes effectively and efficiently. We need to stand up and fight the changes that the government is trying to make and counter the silly arguments that they are using to support their decisions.

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March 24, 2012

UK Coal guilty over miner’s death

UK Coal has again pleaded guilty to health and safety breaches that resulted in the death of a miner.

Ian Cameron, 46, died in 2009 when equipment fell on him at Kellingley pit, Leeds Crown Court heard. Mr Cameron’s death was one of three at Kellingley in the last three years. Last year, UK Coal was ordered to pay £1.2m in fines and costs after it admitted health and safety breaches in relation to the deaths of four miners in four different incidents at pits in Warwickshire and Nottinghamshire.

The company failed to ensure roof supports were properly maintained along with other health and safety breaches.

UK Coal will be sentenced after the trial of Joy Mining Machinery Ltd who has denied a charge of failing to ensure the provision of necessary information about health and safety risks in relation to the use of powered roof supports at Kellingley.

The trial is expected to take place later this year.

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March 11, 2012

The Internet is changing the way that we read think and remember- what are the implications for health and safety?

There has been much enthusiasm for using the net to communicate with staff and raise their awareness of health and safety. We used to publish paper policies and guidance and distribute them and place them on notice boards. Now, they are generally published on the net. We tend to think this is more effective because people are more likely to read it, after all it’s available any time and anywhere.

We were never certain that people read health and safety documents when they were on paper. Now they are on the net, we may actually be even more uncertain. One thing is certain, if they are read, they will most likely be skimmed through, rather than read carefully. People read a book line by line, sometimes skimming but certainly in a different way to how they read on line. Jakob Nielson suggest that they read a page in a way that closely resembles a F, glancing across the first line, letting their gaze drop and glancing across, then scanning down the left side of the page. Most people spend only 19 to 27 seconds looking at an internet page.

Nicholas Carr suggests that the hard wiring of people’s brains is changing to reflect this. As health and safety professionals we need to think about the implications for the way that we communicate about safety.

This has real implications for the way that we use the net to communicate about health and safety. We need to think more carefully about how we communicate the important messages that we are trying to get people to take seriously.

If this is hard wiring our brains then what impact has it already had on emerging generations. How difficult is it going to be to communicate with young people who have grown up with the net. A generation of apprentices who communicate and learn via the net, still needs to learn about health and safety. We need a whole new approach, more creative and innovative if we are to succeed in this and not enough thought is being given to this across the health and safety profession.

References
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

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March 8, 2012

Health and Safety a brand perspective – IOSH Conference 2012

Graham Hales Chief Executive Interbrand, gave one of the most useful and inspiring presentations of the conference. Billed as an inspirational closing speaker he really lived up to the promotional material. But his presentation was more than inspirational, it also captured a real development need for the health and safety profession .

Interbrand began in 1974 when the world thought of brands as just another word for logo. They have changed the dialogue, defined the meaning of brand management, and continue to lead the debate on understanding brands as valuable business assets.

The title was Health and safety a brand perspective

He started by talking about understanding the root cause of public perception and how we need to better explain our position.

He explained that a major problem for the profession is that the media debate is unmanaged and that is exactly how it feels in my experience. He went on to ask whether health and safety was a brand, concluding that it was but it was not managed as a brand. If properly managed, a brand creates identification, differentiation and value.

Graham used one of my favourite quotes

Your brand is what people say about you when you leave the room

– Jeff Bezos founder of Amazon

He then talked about how we should go about improving our position.

He explained how we needed to
Be it,
do it,
say it.

We need to create a code of conduct of key points that we want to get across.
We need to keep promises and live up to expectations.
We need to quickly rectify negative experiences

A big question was about who owns the brand. Who is best placed to manage our brand?

The question is who is listening and how can we carry this forward. If we are to challenge the media perspective on health and safety it is crucial to ensure that we create a brand. As Bezo said our brand is what people say about us when we leave the room. At the moment people describe us as time wasting, over the top, bonkers, red tape obsessed, bureaucratic and out of touch. It seems impossible to turn that around but it is crucial that we do. So who is going to take the lead and help the profession to move forward? Hopefully IOSH will take on board what Graham said and help us to start developing a brand for health and safety.

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February 25, 2012

Lofstedt Report – Health and Safety in schools

Many people have overlooked the important comments made by Lofstedt about changes required in schools. As he says, a significant proportion of the stories that appear in the media concerning disproportionate management of health and safety relate not to traditional workplaces but to schools, and other local authority run activities. We’ve all read the bonkers conkers stuff in the media.

Given the duty of care, the number of accidents, the fact that schools are in loco parents, there is a clear case for schools being included under health and safety legislation. They have the same duties as other employers to protect their employees and others from risks arising from their workplace.

Whilst not specifically mentioned by Lofstedt, the current rush towards Academy status presents a worry that no one is talking about. Health and safety support, provided by local authorities in maintained schools may be forgotten by some Academy schools. Without the voice of the local authority to remind them of their legal responsibilities real health and safety issues like asbestos, legionella, structural safety, management of contractors may not be effectively managed.

Unlike most other workplaces, the focus on educating children presents a rather particular setting for health and safety legislation. It really is important to ensure that interpretation of regulations does not prevent children from being exposed to new or exciting activities that contribute to their education and development. The benefits of such important activities should not be disregarded as a result of a narrow focus on minimising risk.

Unfortunately there are examples of schools producing excessive paper work or taking unnecessary precautions on health and safety grounds. These include banning school yard football games unless the ball is made of sponge and children not being allowed to take part in a sack race at sports day. These examples clearly demonstrate that something needs to be done, but the evidence suggests that it is the way that regulations are being interpreted and applied which
results in such unreasonable outcomes, rather than the regulations themselves. So let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Let’s get more realistic, more creative, more pragmatic and more sensible about health and safety in schools.

Having said all of that we all need to tackle the media myths. Many in the media describe an educational world empty of excitement and challenge because of overbearing health and safety regulations. In September 2011 the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee published the findings of an inquiry into practical experiments in school science lessons and field trips, which came about due to “the perception that health and safety concerns are preventing practical science in schools and fieldwork and field trips”. The inquiry concluded that this perception was largely misconceived, and that there was no credible evidence to support health and safety as the reason for the decline of practicals and work outside the classroom.

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December 15, 2011

UK Coal fined over miner deaths

The company was fined following the deaths of a number of its employees:-

- Trevor Steeples was suffocated by a methane build-up at Daw Mill in 2006
UK Coal has been ordered to pay £1.2m after four miners died following safety breaches at two of its collieries.

- Anthony Garrigan, 42, Paul Hunt, 45, and Trevor Steeples, 46, died in accidents at Daw Mill colliery, near Coventry, in 2006 and 2007.

- Paul Milner, 44, died after an accident at the now-closed Welbeck Colliery in Nottinghamshire, in 2007.

UK Coal was fined £112,500 for each incident and ordered to pay a further £187,500 in costs in each case.

Based on the Judges comments the penalty would have been higher but it would have crippled the struggling firm. The company, which employs about 2,700 people, reported losses of £124.6m in 2010, following losses of £129.1m in 2009 and £15.6m in 2008.
The Judge urged the families of the dead men to focus on the total combined financial penalty.
He said:

These were, of course, dreadful accidents. They were preventable accidents.
However, unlike most criminal acts, there was no intention to kill or injure.
But the law rightly demands a high duty of care by employers for the safety of their employees and other workers.
Mining is and will remain a dangerous occupation. These accidents all occurred in the depths of the Earth.”

Crushed by coal

Mr Steeples, from West Bridgford, Nottingham, died at Daw Mill on 19 June 2006 when he was suffocated by a methane build-up in part of the mine.

Mr Hunt, from Swadlincote, Derbyshire, died after he fell from an underground transporter into the path of a train at the same colliery on 6 August 2006. The judge was told at an earlier hearing the poorly-maintained transporter had been declared unfit for passengers but miners still used it instead of a 40-minute uphill underground walk.

Mr Garrigan, from Thorne, near Doncaster, was crushed by 100 tonnes of coal and stone at Daw Mill on 17 January 2007. He had been installing bolts into the wall of a tunnel which had a history of collapses.

Mr Milner, from Church Warsop, Nottinghamshire, died at Welbeck Colliery in Meden Vale near Mansfield when a roof fell in on 3 November 2007. He had been helping to install roof supports so equipment could be salvaged from a coal face where production had already stopped.

Mr Steeple’s mother Anne said in a statement after the hearing that she was disappointed no individuals had been successfully prosecuted over her son’s death.

“We wish all miners a long and safe future and are thankful Trevor doesn’t know all we’ve been through since he was killed and how the system has let him down so badly.”

Outside court, Bob Leeming, HM Inspector of Mines, said:

Fewer than 4,000 people are employed in the UK mining sector, which makes four deaths within 18 months even more stark.

All it would have taken to prevent these deaths was better management and proper hazard control by UK Coal.

Based on a BBC report published 14th December 2011

Posted in coal, duty of care, Fines, health and safety, HSE, mining, safety, safety management | Leave a Comment »

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