Things we forgot

I learned about three unlrelated things this weekend that have passed out of the public consciousness (as far as I know). They are only vaguely relevant to safety, but I offer them anyway.

• There used to be "lorry girls" in the 1930s and 1940s who hung around the cafes on the A roads (precursors of the motorway services) and hitched rides with what would now be called LGV drivers up and down the country for thrills.
• Also in the 30s, there was a group of Americans lured from the depression hit US to the Soviet Union with the promise of work and wages to help industrialise the USSR during Stalin's five-year plans. They were then among the first to come under suspicion in the purges and ended their lives in the gulags. Their story is in The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Jim Tzouliadis, which I strongly recommend.
• Before cows routinely had their horns removed, farmers sometimes used to screw brass knobs (bedknobs or cupboard handles) into the top of them to make them less hazardous.

Louis

Fake testicles at the Olympics site

I went to the Olympic park in East London this morning and i can testify to the fact that it is one very well ordered site. Driving round, all the materials were neatly stored, pedestrians and vehicles were carefully segregated and I don't think it was a show put on for visitors. I've written about these features before, see here but then I had to take them on trust (albeit from ODA safety head Lawrence Waterman, who is as trustworthy as the come); good to see it first hand.

Construction progress is also impressive, the structure of the main stadium is pretty well complete, Zaha Hadid's floating roof for the aquatics centre is taking shape and the velodrome piling is complete. The lift cores for the Olympic village blocks (which will eventually be sold off as des-res flats) are also up, along with the frame of the press centre.

I was there because safety minister Lord McKenzie was touring the occupational helath centre which mixes the standard health surveillance the contractors are obliged to do anyway with some remarkable work (for the construction sector) trying to get builders to take their health seriously. This includes toolbox talks with a pair of fake testicles, to teach labourers to check their own for cancer, and a competition to find the strongest men and women on the site (using a grip test, which is a very good tell-tale for upper limb disorders).

McKenzie said he was impressed. I asked him if this sort of service could be mandated for all major publicly-funded projects, since there are a fair few of those coming up - all those accelerated public works the government has green-lit to help construction and civil engineering firms weather the recession - and the reason it's there on the Olympics is because the ODA as client paid for it.

He said he would go away and "talk about it", which is something.

Louis

Laser precision

For anyone who thought the lack of any talk in the past couple of years about the Artificial Optical Radiation Directive (which basically covers protection from lasers) meant it had gone away, perhaps kicked into the long grass like its sister law on electro-magnetic fields...think again.

We have nine months and counting to bring in UK regulations protecting workers from thin beams of light. The hazards are pretty well covered here by the Management Regs and UK users of powerful lasers used in medicine, welding and glass making and are working to guidelines from the International Commission for Non-Ionising Radiation Protection which set the same exposure limits as the Directive.

But we can't get out of the requirement to transpose it, anymore than we could with the other "physical agents" Directives on noise and vibration. So the HSE has to run round and draft a set of low-impact regs and try and get them into statute by next April.

Louis

HSE chiefs back at the Select Committee

I sat through HSE chief Exec Geoffrey Podger and chair Judith Hackitt's reappearance before the Work and Pensions Select Committee yesterday and at the end of a couple of hours wasn't really sure why the committee had bothered calling them back.

It may be that there were too many members missing (only 4 of the 11-strong committee were there), but there wasn't much probing. They asked about some of the most important issues: the HSE's new strategy; deaths at refurbishment sites; HSE morale; construction inspectorate numbers; devolving the nuclear inspectorate; the expected impact of the Health and Safety Offences Act on fines (if anyone wants a summary of the questions and answers on these, email me).

But the committee members didn't seem to pursue them very hard. Podger's claim that almost seven years of falling numbers of HSE prosecutions - there was a small rise in 2003/04 - didn't represent a downward trend went pretty much unchallenged, for instance. There was a lot of tentative tugging at loose ends and then moving on.

Given the HSE's dismissive response to the Select Committee's 97 recommendations in its special report on the HSE's work last year, I'd expected them to be a bit more challenging.

Louis

Long time, no write

I've been neglecting this, been very busy, but that's no excuse. Some highlights of the past couple of months:

HSE strategy launch
Then secretary of state of work and pensions James Purnell introducing the strategy in a distracted manner (he resigned the next day). Also Judith Hackitt's thousand-yard stare at the Q&A when Health and Safety Bulletin editor Howard Fidderman asked her why the only employer featured on the video to promote the strategy was Corus, whose health and safety record in recent years has been ... chequered.

RoSPA Congress
Bizarre sight of Tom Mullarkey interviewing HSE chief exec Geoffrey Podger in the manner of Ali G. Mullarkey was trying to make Podger touch fists with him and say "booyakasha!" Podger, wisely, refused to join in.

Safety & Health Expo in Birmingham
Lively, but predictably far quieter than in previous years. About 1/3 down on exhibitors and I'd guess the same on visitors. Difficult to tell how much of this is recession and how much the impact of competition from alternatives such as the Western Publishing regional shows in Sandown, Bolton and, soon, Edinburgh.

First corporate manslaughter charge
Everyone has already covered the ground about the defendant being a small company, so not really the kind the new law was intended to catch, see here. But a secondary wrinkle is the fact that if the prosecution succeeds, without any finalised guidelines on sentencing the judge might decide to follow the last draft guidance and set a fine at 5% of the company's annual turnover. That would be under £20,000, almost certainly lower than if the case had proceeded under the Health and Safety at Work Act.

I'll not leave it so long in future.

Louis

how the other half lived

or died. Just watching The Lost World of Communism on BBC2.

One of the builders on Nicolae Ceausescu's monstrous palace of the people in the centre of Bucharest (for which 30,000 people's homes were demolished) said "Out of my work group of 100, 13 died. Two committed suicide and the rest were killed in accidents."

Podger on competence and targets

I'm at the IOSH conference in Liverpool. Geoffrey Podger just finished a stage interview with Channel 4's Krishnan Guru-Murthy and took some pointed questions from the floor on evaluating competence of safety practitioners.

Podger's argument was that if "third sector" organisations such as IOSH and CIEH and IIRSM want to define competence further, they are free to, but the HSE's view is that the definition in the Management Regulations, however loosely drawn, is good enough.

One questioner (in social services) supported him but the general thrust was that HSE could do more.
A delegate from the CIEH told him: "You are going to have to change your attitude and work harder with us to get a definition of competence to get the results you want."
(The results being the improved accident figures the new strategy sets an aim, albeit vaguely.)

On which point, Podger also said earlier in the session that the new strategy would still be tied to the targets set in the Revitalising Health and Safety Strategy in 1989. This is confusing as they were 10 year targets (for cuts in accidents self reported work-related illness and working days lost to both) and though they probably won't all be met by 2010 it seems strange to start a new strategy with the old goals. But that's what he said.