WORKING AT HEIGHT
management and shareholders of both the employing company and the contractors don’t have the right culture.
Take PTSG Electrical Services, who were recently fined £120,000 by the HSE after a worker fell from a building site roof and died. The HSE found the man’s employer had failed to adequately risk assess the work and had opted to give the workers PPE instead of using scaffolding or a mobile elevating work platform. They also hadn’t planned for getting the rope access equipment on and off the roof safely and provided no instructions to workers on how to do this.
As HSE inspector Sara Andrews said: “This incident could easily have been avoided by better planning of the work to ensure adequate controls were in place to prevent falls from the roof.”
“TO REDUCE FALLS FROM HEIGHT, WE NEED TO CONCENTRATE ON THREE THINGS: MONEY, MANAGEMENT AND RESOURCE.”
Enforcing this presents its own challenges though. There is no ‘Gas Safe’ quality control equivalent for fall protection, and no governing body. And just because a company adheres to IS031000: 2018 (Risk management – Guidelines), doesn’t mean it always puts those safety guidelines into practice at the coal face.
Even the audit process has its limits. Most companies responsible for falls from height would have sailed through a traditional audit, because the problem lies in the poor organising and planning of a job, which an audit often won’t pick up.
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Harvey Dun added: “Problems often occur when the people actually doing the job are three or four steps removed from the client. When I investigate incidents, I often find several points where multiple people should have stepped in and stopped the job. Sometimes the bigger company will overrule the decision of a sub- contractor, and if something goes wrong because of that, the buck should then stop with them.”
All this means employers need to take ownership of this issue themselves. In the world of facilities management and building maintenance, this means selecting competent contractors. And it’s not just the company itself that needs to be considered competent; they must also ensure the contractor is sending the right team members for each job.
It also involves making sure instructions are communicated properly, and contractors are fully briefed and inducted appropriately. Perhaps most crucially of all, they must ensure there’s enough management resource to oversee the job correctly.
In our experience at William Martin, larger companies generally have a good safety culture. In comparison to large contracts, the proportion of time spent on adequately organising, planning and risk-assessing a smaller job can seem prohibitive. This can lead to smaller businesses or the self-employed cutting corners and treating accidents as a risk worth taking to keep costs and resources down.
Simply put, the sector needs to come together to weed these companies out. If contractors who are not operating safely stop getting work, they won’t survive - and it’s only then that the safety record of the industry as a whole will significantly improve.
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