FEATURE
THE BURDEN OF PROOF
After a cable strike, the question is no longer whether your operatives were trained. It is whether you can prove it – and whether the training they received meets the standard the law actually requires, says Peter Ashcroft, founder of independent training provider Sygma Solutions.
When the Health and Safety Executive arrives on a site following a serious utility strike, the conversation moves quickly from what happened to what was in place beforehand. Risk assessments. Method statements. Permits. And – almost without exception – training records. The question the inspector is trying to answer is simple: was the operative competent to carry out that work?
For SHEQ managers, the uncomfortable truth is that ‘competent’ is not the same as ‘certified’. The two have drifted further apart in recent years, and the gap is where prosecutions live.
THE LEGAL FRAMEWORK, BRIEFLY
Two pieces of guidance and regulation set the floor. HSG47 – Avoiding Danger from Underground Services is the HSE’s published guide on safe excavation around buried utilities. It is guidance, not law in itself, but it is what an inspector and a court will reference when assessing whether reasonable precautions were taken.
The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 – CDM – place the legal duty on the principal contractor and the employer to ensure that anyone carrying out excavation work is properly informed, instructed, trained and supervised. The regulations do not specify a particular qualification, but they do require that competence is demonstrable.
“FOR SHEQ MANAGERS, THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH IS THAT ‘COMPETENT’ IS NOT THE SAME AS ‘CERTIFIED’. ”
This is where evidence becomes everything. In practical terms, that evidence almost always takes the form of a recognised training certificate, a record of refresher cycles, and increasingly, some form of on-site competency check between formal renewals.
WHY EUSR CATEGORY 1 LOCATE UTILITY SERVICES HAS BECOME THE BENCHMARK
EUSR Category 1 Locate Utility Services – the Energy and Utilities Skills Register’s Category 1 cable avoidance qualification – has emerged over the past several years as the de facto industry standard for proving operative competence on cable avoidance tools. It is now mandated by most major utility companies and their tier-one supply chains as a condition of site access.
The qualification combines a multiple-choice theory assessment with a practical test on a live training rig,
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