FEATURE FOCUS: HEALTH & SAFETY
Redefining the role of “responsible person” I
n our second feature this month looking at aspects of health and safety, we’re delighted to hear from Matthew Fahy, Managing Director of Inspectas Compliance. Matthew has over 20 years of experience as an independent consultant in compliance working across the education sector including universities, colleges, multi academy trusts and single schools. Across two decades, he has seen the role of a “responsible” and “competent” person shift from head teachers to bursars, to estates directors and more recently to specialists in health & safety.
Using his personal experience in managing asbestos across the education stock, Matthew explores the changing legislative landscape and how school teams manage the challenges of history and shifting priorities to ensure their schools operate safe in the knowledge that health and safety not only meets, but exceeds industry standards.
Under the Health & Safety at Work act (1974), education employers have a duty to protect the welfare of teachers, pupils, visitors, volunteers and contractors. But with the complexities of the educational building stock, a decade of legislative changes driven by events and life-changing disasters, should we expect our school teams to
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have the knowledge base to provide a safe, physical environment?
Who is your responsible person? Every school must have a “responsible person” for property safety – the individual who ensures that all relevant safety duties are carried out and is accountable for preventing failures in health and safety and for implementing measures to protect people from injury or death. The responsible person is the individual who is deemed to have control of the premises. This can include the employer, the owner of the building, the landlord of the building, a facilities manager, building manager, managing agent, risk assessor, or anyone else with control of the premises. In schools this can include the caretaker, the bursar or the estates facilities manager and it carries a high level of responsibility. It is unlikely that given today’s fast moving legislative landscape that a typical school has an inhouse individual with the required level of experience and I have seen a shift towards partnering with qualified technical advisors.
Decades of change… and decay There is a wide range of educational property stock across the UK including Victorian listed buildings, CLASP post war “temporary” buildings, 1970’s clad buildings and more recently, buildings constructed and managed via PFI schemes. Some
April 2024
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