HEALTH & SAFETY
A Client’s
The value of health & safety in challenging times
This is the third in a series of articles examining the challenges facing the onshore wind energy sector in improving safety standards in a difficult economic climate, and how these challenges are to be overcome.
Our previous article presented this challenge from the contractors’ perspective. It showed that when everyone is focused on maintaining profitability, health and safety can become vulnerable to cost cutting. How effective an organisation is at maintaining safety standards on a wind-farm construction site is then determined by the effectiveness of their safety leadership.
This article presents this challenge from the client’s perspective, including comment from Chris Black, Head of Health, Safety and Quality at ScottishPower Renewables and the former chair of the RenewableUK Lessons Learnt Scheme.
Perspective By Esther Walker, Director of Forum Interactive WHO’S IN CHARGE OF SAFETY?
The main challenge for producers is how to ensure a safe site. Wind-farm construction sites are complex places in which to enforce and maintain a consistent standard of behavioural safety. A range of contractors are working alongside one another at any one time, bringing together different safety cultures (and often languages) as well as groups who are focussed on completing their own particular part of the project.
By law, it is the principal contractor who should exercise control over its own employees and other contractors working on site. However, as David MacDonald (Civil Engineering Director of Global Construction) said in our last article, how successful the principal contractor is in doing this will depend on the relationships they are able to develop with other contractors on site. Where they have appointed these contractors themselves, they are able to exert influence through their own supply chain. But where contractors are appointed directly by the client, it can sometimes be harder to forge such relationships.
Ideally, the behavioural safety programme operated by the principal contractor will ensure that the organisation’s values and accepted behaviours are directing the actions not only of their own employees but also those of sub-contractors. Behavioural safety programmes also work best when managers, supervisors and engineers are using their influence to challenge unsafe acts.
To exercise this influence, managers, supervisors and engineers need to understand their own role as safety leaders and feel confident to intervene on unsafe acts. This exposes a limitation in some behavioural safety programmes which tend to focus exclusively on the behaviour of front line workers rather than the people with the most authority, and therefore the most influence on site.
Chris Black “effective safety leadership creates a safety culture in which everyone recognises the role he plays in maintaining a safe site.” Where contractors, such as Global Construction, demonstrate this level of commitment to safety leadership, they set themselves apart from their competitors. Producers like ScottishPower Renewables recognise that they also need to take a more hands-on approach if safety standards are to improve.
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www.windenergynetwork.co.uk
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