Ban the hazard nuts, not the peanuts

Some US schools are banning nuts from their premises to try to protect children with allergies, and in the most extreme case a school bus was allegedly evacuated because someone spotted a peanut on the vehicle's floor, see here.

Seems to me a classic case of focusing on the hazard rather than the risk. Only 150 people in the US die every year of any type of food allergy (so nut intolerance will be responsible for only some of those), while around 250 die from choking on their food and around 42,000 are killed in car accidents.

By concentrating on the severity of the potential reaction among those with allergies, rather than the probability of anyone actually being in contact with the allergen (did they think the peanut was going to leap off the floor and go for a child's throat?) people are bound to over-react.

I could see the point when the airlines swapped their little bags of nuts for biscuits; all those little bags being opened at once propelling nut dust into a confined cabin would definitely pose some risk of a sensitised passenger going into anaphylactic shock one day.

But this seems silly.

Louis

Yes to no-go homes

News over the weekend on the BBC that the ambulance service now have a "risk list" of 8500 homes, which paramendics won't attend calls to without police support.

Violence against the emergency services is nothing new (our feature in the magazine recently had some awful stories from fire services of officers being lured on false alarms into buildings that were booby trapped with razor blades embedded in the bannisters, see here if you are an HSW subscriber) and a lot of services have operated informal systems of logging premises where there has been trouble in the past.

This database is just more systematic, but inevitable really. And while the people who object are right that the records have to be up to date or the emergency services could lose vital time staying away from places where there is no threat, the argument that they need to protect themselves is also strong.

This is one of the things that the Conservatives don't really seem to have taken on board when they talk about changing the law so the police don't have to prioritise their own safety on active duty (this came up in David Cameron's and shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve's speeches at the recent Tory conference).

It's all very well saying the police should be able to pitch in regardless, but the head of safety at a north of England force told me the reason they forbid officers from wading in to save drowning swimmers at the seaside is that a common outcome is that both parties drown, or at least both need rescuing.

And when staff from the ambulance serivice or police or fire services are needlessly injured, they won't be on duty when they are really needed to help others in trouble.

Deaths at work guidelines - a date at last

Howard Fidderman, editor of Health and Safety Bulletin (the UK's best H&S publication) has been talking to the Sentencing Guidelines Council about the intended date for the long-awaited guidance for judges on penalties for deaths at work (including corporate manslaugther prosecutions).

The draft that went out for consultation late in 2007 suggested setting guide fines for manslughter at betwee 5% and 10% of a company's annual turnover, which would mean fines potentially topping hundreds of millions for bigger companies. The biggest to date in the UK was £25 million

After the consultation everything went quiet. Now, according to Howard, the SGC are saying there will be a new draft in December and final guidelines inApril next year.

Workstation on a tight budget

I just asked Duncan Abbott of ergonomics consultants Enrico Smog what he thought the effects of a downturn on health and safety spending might be and he sent me a picture of the budget office of the future. What a card.

A very very hazardous pastime

The airline pilots union Balpa has complained about a series of incidents in which people on the ground have been shining laser pointers into the eyes of pilots in planes when they are coming in to land (see here).

I don't subscribe to the we're-all-going-to-hell-in-a-handcart view of society that would see this as just another sign of bigger woes. But as an example of the pointless stupidity of a few creating risk for many, it's hard to beat.

At least when the Cornish villagers used to set up false beacons on the coast to draw ships onto the rocks in centuries past, they did it because they were going to profit from the wrecks. What on earth would these people gain?

Construction fatalities: some kind of silver lining

It's perhaps a statement of the obvious, but the current economic choppiness is likely to produce the reduction in construction industry fatalities and major accidents that industry bodies and government have made such a priority over the past year.

All over the country, construction projects are being mothballed, completion dates are being pushed back by two or three years (which amounts to the same thing) and housebuilders' profitability has fallen off a cliff (Bovis down 84% in six months, Taylor Wimpey £1.54 million into the red over the same period).

More importantly, retail sales figures show consumers shying away from bigger purchases, as they always do in a downturn. And if householders aren't buying fridges and flat screens, they certainly aren't going to be pressing on with extensions and loft conversions, which means a lot less activity in the refurbishment sector, whose small contractors contribute a disproportionate number of construction fatalities.

Obviously, the builders' federations and the HSE aren't going to take credit or comfort for a cut in accidents because of a cut in the number of building projects. Their focus is, as it should be, on the accident rates, which control for fluctuations in activity that distort the overall totals.

But a temporary reduction overall might provide some breathing space to arrange some of the measures they have proposed to help cut accident rates in the medium term. At the summit called by the then work and pensions secretary Peter Hain to tackle a 30% rise in deaths on building sites, the representatives of various federations and unions came up with all sorts of ideas. These ranged from health and safety information distributed at "point of sale" in builders' merchants, to complulsory safety passports for all construction workers.

But they were only ideas and, though there has been work on some of them since, they will take time. However painful for the contractors themselves and all the self-employed workers in the industry, a quiet period could provide some "swing space" to get better preventative measures in place.

The Safety Offences Bill in the Lords

I've just been reading the second reading debate in the House of Lords on the Health and Safety Offences Bill (just to recap, a Private Member's Bill on higher fines and potential prison sentences for health and safety offences, which looks likely to get through because it has government support).

You get a better class of debate in the Lords. The Earl of Mar and Kellie (the title's from Fife) raises some points about the Bill, some of which are answered, but i do love his turn of phrase:

"...Thirdly, the Bill allows for the imprisonment of the body corporate, but it is not at all clear about how the human representatives of the body corporate will be chosen. How will they be selected? This reminds me of the wretched whipping boy supplied to take the punishment of the youthful King James VI in George Buchanan’s schoolroom. Fourthly, I can see considerable impact on minute-takers and pressure on them after each meeting to establish and record who had reservations about each corporate decision. Fifthly, is there not a better reality for corporate imprisonment? Rather than directors or senior staff being imprisoned, is not corporate loss of liberty in fact suspension from trading? Does the Bill not attempt to dismantle the concept of a separate legal persona for businesses? Sixthly, Network Rail has suggested amendments which reduce the imprisonable to those who are personally and identifiably guilty. Seventhly, Network Rail also points out that, without such clarification, someone who had not attended the trial could be imprisoned—a sort of contracted blame-taker."

Beastly injuries

There's been a few stories this year of people being seriously injured by large animals. The latest is an ex-dairy farmer who won £60,000 compensation for being attacked by a cow, see here. It's difficult not to smile instinctively at the thought of normally docile animals being a threat (there's a kind of Keyestone cops folk memory of the policeman bending down and being kicked by the horse, or Carry-on characters being chased by bulls across fields, which is hard to shift and your average cow doesn't exactly look threatening) but the sheer weight of these animals can make anyone one facing one moving at speed feel like a very moveable object.

The HSE's figures show an average of 49 agricultural deaths each year from 1997 to 2007 (the headline stats are on the executive's main agriculture page ) and it looks like only five of those are due to contact with livestock. I'd be interested in the totals for less serious injuries. Might go and look...

Work at height prosecutions - the figures

Dr Dave Merchant of http://www.uvsar.com/ who, when he's not scaling new heights himself, advises other people on how to do it safely, has been collating the figures for prosecutions last year under the Work at Height Regulations and sent me a breakdown of the parts of the Regulations the HSE has cited in the cases it brought.

The most common charge (in 46 cases) was a failure to meet Regulation 6, which covers the need for risk assessment, avoiding work at height if it can be carried out safely in another wayand using suitable control measures to stop fall injuries where the work is unavoidable. As a catch-all for what usually goes wrong, it makes sense this is the most common charge

Regulation 4 is next with 28 charges. This covers failure to organise and plan WAH. As Dave puts it, "People who haven't made any effort to even read the regs get done under 4.1 ". Most of them come down to accidents using portable ladders.

Interesting to see that only 14 cases involved a charge of failing to take precaustion where employees were working around fragine surfaces at height (Reg 9). I'd swear that we reported on more cases of employees who fell through rooflights and asbestos roof panels last year.

For those of you who know the Regs well, i'm including Dave's table below. He's written us some very very good articles on different aspects of work at height, including one on the dangers of caged ladders (a subject the HSE seems to have become quite shy about) which i really recommend.


Reg /Charges/ Title
1 /N/A /Citation and commencement
2 /N/A /Interpretation
3 /N/A /Application
4 /28 /Organisation and planning
5/ 2 /Competence
6 /45/ Avoidance of risks from work at height
7 /3 /Selection of work equipment for work at height
8 /12 /Requirements for particular work equipment
9 /14 /Fragile surfaces
10/ 6 /Falling objects
11 /0 /Danger areas
12 /5/ Inspection of work equipment
13 /0 /Inspection of places of work at height
14 /0 /Duties of persons at work - Special provision in relation to
caving and climbing
15 /N/A / Exemption by the Health and Safety Executive
16 /N/A / Exemption for the armed forces
17 / N/A /Amendment of the Provision and Use of Work Equipment
Regulations 1998
18 /N/A /Repeal of section 24 of the Factories Act 1961
19 /N/A / Revocation of instruments

Careful who you call

According to the Guardian, the HSE and local authorities will be able to request internet service providers and phone companies to hand over records of email and phone exchanges as part of their investigations into safety breaches. The HSE and other public bodies will be able to ask for data that the telecoms companies will now have to store for a month under a new EU Directive.

They won't be able to access the content of the phone and email traffic, just the logs of who wrote to or called whom, to help them in their investigations.

It's the sort of thing that might be useful to investigators looking at a corporate manslaughter charge and would mean that any compromising email that passed through an ISP couldn't simply be wiped from the system and forgotten. There are enough warnings from lawyers about howmuch you should say in accident reports that might end up disclosed to an investigating authority, and here's another reason for caution.

The Guardian piece is here

smoking in the van: It's not a fair cop guv

Lots of press coverage about the case of a decorator from Aberystwyth pulled over by council officials and fined for smoking in his own van, see here .

Obviously the papers are doing their usual schtick about the world gone mad, but it's a straightforward contravention of the smoke-free regulations which say that a work vehicle constitutes a workplace and smoking is prohibited.

Except that the Regs (paragraph 4 (1) of the Smoke-free Premises etc. (Wales) Regulations 2007, since you ask) actually say that a vehicle shall be smoke free if it is "used for work purposes by more than one person (even if the persons who use it for such purposes do so at different times, or only intermittently)."

But Gordon Williams the decorator, says he only uses the van himself, so I'm not sure they had him to rights.

Meanwhile if you want to see an open and shut case of someone breaking the law on smoke-free vehicles, there's one here (she's in a hire car)

Another day, another compensation outrage

A householder in greater Leeds has received a compensation claim from a postal worker who slipped on his front steps delivering a letter (see here). The drift of these stories is always that there is a compensation culture gone mad, and fings aint what they used to be.

But is it so unreasonable for someone to take responsibility for the slip resistance of their front steps, especially when there are five of them). The fact that the homeowner says "no one's ever had a problem on them before in the 12 years we've lived here" might just be down to luck and doesn't mean they shouldn't have watched out for wear. Comes down to foreseeability i suppose. It's not that I think private individuals should be risk assessing every potential impace they or their goods could have ad-infinitum, i'm just irked (again) by the national press's assumption that they have a monopoly on common sense.

En standards below ... standard

I hear the HSE is going to challenge some of the European (EN) Standards applied to personal protective equipment (PPE) such as fall arrest equipment, on the basis that they are inadequate compared to the British Standards.

Apparently, in some of the major EU countries the way you get onto a standards-setting board is by paying to be on it. And if you pay enough, you get to chair the board. So they are stuffed with manufacturers who are not always interested in making the standards too demanding.

The downside of free cycles

An unintended consequence of the Velib scheme in Paris (which allows people to pick up one of 16000 bikes placed around the city and rise it for a nominal charge) has been a big hike in road accidents, see here.

Police are blaming it partly on the fact that the Velib riders are less likely to be wearing helmets and hi-vis vests, since it's often a spur-of-the-moment decision.

Presumably, many of them are also less likely to be regular cyclists (or they would have their own bikes) and negotiating Paris traffic is definitely an acquired art.

The two types of health and safety story

Sorry there's been a bit of a hiatus on the blog, we are a staff member down here and it's been a frantic time.

Anyway, just been thinking about two streams of health and safety stories that run in the national press. The first are the ones that exercise IOSH and the HSE so much, that pour scorn on H&S as a disipline for being over-nannying and proscriptive, banning hanging baskets, conker games and so on.

The other strand is the ones about Personal injury claims against employers for unusual accidents, as with the case in the past few days of the school caretaker who has won the right to pursue a claim for £50,000 against Hampshire County Council for not training him to use a stepladder, see here.

What they never seem to comment on is the causal link between the two trends (assuming the first one actually is a trend). There are plenty of references to the compensation culture and how we are becoming as litigious as the Americans, but nobody seems to be pointing up the fact that if employers keep shelling out, or rather their liability insurers do, of course they are going to be more risk averse and be restricting anything not essential to their core activities (whether its educating children or making diesel injectors) that would risk an increase in their insurance premia.

There's nothing unusual about the mainstream press having their cake and eating it, but the HSE, in concentrating on the individual cases, as in their myth of the month campaign, might be missing a chance to draw attention to the bigger picture.

A spin cycle too fast

There's a headline in Metro today: Why your boss may be a "cold blooded killer". The quote is from Dr David White of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at the University of London's King's College.

Dr White is publicising a new report he co-wrote which argues that HSE budget cuts and a culture of lighter enforcement mean that occupational fatalities are often underinvestigated. The report contrasts the total of 1400 work-related deaths in 2006-07 (excluding occupational diseases but including at-work road deaths) with the numbers killed through violent crime (about half as many), saying there is a moral panic about street murder while the bigger total is ignored or misreported in a culture of silence.

So far, so reasonable. The report makes some decent points, but White, who is on the board of the pressure group the Centre for Corporate Accountability risks undermining his own point by telling the press workplace deaths are "cold-blooded and planned more than street murders". Negligence is may be as terrible as viciousness in its effects sometimes, and there are moves to better recognise that in the recent corporate manslughter legislation and the current sentencing bill but the two are not the same thing.

The length of HSE's outreach

The HSE is running a safety awareness day on 2 July in Lerwick for Shetland farmers and crofters, covering animal handling, dust, work at height, child safety and the use of quad bikes.

Attendees are promised "refreshments: soup and a filled roll". Which is only fair as many will have come quite a way.

Encouraging public whistleblowing

Here's a sign typical of ones I saw on several construction sites on a recent trip to the US. It's the equivalent of the "How is my driving?" notices some hauliers put on the back of their large goods vehicles. Except that the 311 on this sign doesn't get you through to the builder's head office but to the New York city authorities.

Encouraging passers-by to act as whistleblowers for construction risks may not be a bad idea (in our coverage of the HSE's recent blitz of refurbishment sites, one of the inspectors said he had been alerted to unsafe roof work by a member of the public).

The only obvious drawbacks are that most casual observers won't know they are looking at a lack of edge protection or absent banksmen, or might call in things that aren't actually hazardous. Plus the fact that the contractors who most warrant this kind of attention are the least likely ever to put up a sign inviting it.

Promotional incentives

Mining company Anglo American, which had 40 worker fatalities in 2007, has warned managers in its South African operation that they will not be promoted if the company's safety record doesn't improve, see here. The group's chairman announced the move at the April AGM. We've written a lot in HSW about incentives for employees to reduce accident records and even a few management bonuses tied to safety performance, but this looks like a very clear way to focus managers' minds.

Short of a Darwin

I can't approve of the Darwin awards (so called because they are supposed to recognise a version of natural selection where people killed because of their own foolish actions remove themselves from the gene pool), because accidental death is just not funny even if the circumstances are potentially comic..

But one of the incidents shortlisted in this year's awards involved no fatality so I'm going to risk recounting it:

Kerry Bingham had been drinking with several friends when one of them said they knew a person who had bungee-jumped from a local river bridge. The conversation grew more heated and at least 10 men trooped along the walkway of the bridge at 4:30 AM. Upon arrival at the midpoint of the bridge they discovered that no one had brought a bungee rope. Bingham, who had continued drinking, volunteered and pointed out that a coil of lineman's cable, lay nearby. They secured one end around Bingham's leg and then tied the other to the bridge. His fall lasted 40 feet before the cable tightened and tore his foot off at the ankle.. He miraculously survived his fall into the icy water and was rescued by two nearby fishermen. Bingham's foot was never located.

Other foolish acts short of a grisly end are recounted here

Children and risk

I was at the House of Lords yesterday for the IOSH honorary vice presidents' lunch (apostrophe after the s because there's more than one honorary VP and in fact two new ones were appointed at the lunch: HSE chair Judith Hackitt and the tory peer Lord Brougham and Vaux).

Judith Hackitt gave a speech saying she really wants to draw attention to the worrying signs that there's a generation growing up who will be prevented from going on school trips because they are perceived as dangerous. She was talking about a Channel 4 Cutting Edge programme a couple of weeks back: Cotton Wool Kids, which featured parents explaining why they never let their children out to play with friends and followed one mother driving round town with her young daughter pointing out passers by who looked like kidnappers.

Hackitt says she's woried there'll be a whole load of people entering the workforce who are either "risk naive or risk paranoid".

I half agree and I'll post some thoughts on the other half another time.

On a purely trivial note, the Houses of Parliament are breathtaking, the most impressive of Victorian gothic bling you'll find anywhere in the UK, all intricately carved woodwork and stone and handblocked allpaper. But the tented area on the terrace beside the Thames, where they hold visitors lunches like the IOSH one, is a far cry. It was church-hall chairs and Argos chandeliers and the walls looked like curtain netting. Food was good though.

Risk and personality

I was talking to a senior safety manager at one of the big transport groups yesterday. She said they're starting a project to risk assess people's attitudes and personality types alongside the more traditional activity-based assessments.


They want to find out, and control for, some people's increased willingness to run red lights.


She says it'll be a long project and will only pay off over a couple of years if at all, but it fits with their competency based approach to recruiting people with the right aptitudes for any job.

I'm hoping we'll get a chance to cover it in HSW when it's a bit further advanced. In the meantime I'd be interested if anyone has examples of other organisations who've tried this kind of approach.

Smart lawyers

I was talking to health and safety lawyer Stuart Armstrong of McGrigors yesterday about the way personal injury lawyers have become much more clued up in the way they pursue work-related claims. Where there has been an accident at work and the HSE is investigating for a possible criminal prosecution, the victim's PI lawyers will often wait for the HSE's case to be decided before taking their claim to court.

Armstrong says one neat trick on the part of the PI lawyers is to request diclosure of safety documentation such as risk assessments from the employer, and if they don't get it, to mention it to the HSE investigators with the implication that the company may have something it wants to hide in that area.

A new benchmark for fatality fines

Ofwat (water regulator) head Regina Finn was on the radio just now explaining why she had fined SevernTrent water £38.5 million for misreporting its customer service ratings.

Finn said the penalty is 3% of Severn Trent's annual turnover and that it is "proportionate and appropriate" and will act as "a deterrent to this kind of behaviour".

The Sentencing Guidelines Council has been consulting since November on new guidelines for judges setting fines for corporate manslaughter convictions and prosecutions for fatalities under the Health and Safety at Work Act. Their draft recommended fines of between 2.5% and 7.5% of a company's annual turnover for HSW Act convictions, but there has been speculation that these percentages might be reduced to less punitive levels.

Now we know the order of magnitude of the offence of fibbing to a regulator about your customer satisfaction levels is a 3% penalty, let's hope the final advice on what it should cost a business to neglect employees' safety to the point of fatality doesn't set the bar any lower.

Harriet Harman goes protected

So Harriet Harman feels the need of a stab-proof vest when she tours Peckham. Perhaps she lives in fear of Sabatier-wielding Labour voters rushing at her shouting "You robbed Alan Johnson of the deputy leadership!" or "This is what you get for voting for top-up fees!".

Sadly, the greatest risk she probably faced was that no one would recognise her, even with a police escort.

I have to report an injury

I am a figure of fun in the office because I shortened my thumb by 4mm yesterday with a Stanley knife and spent several hours in A&E.

It was stupidity: I was cutting a piece of veneered chipboard with only an aluminium rule between the blade and my thumb (next time I'm using angle iron). But in my defence I've spent the last four years taking a whole floor of a house "back to slab" as they say in the refurbishment sector, remaking ceilings, stud walls and door frames and fitting a new kitchen and bathroom, and my dynamic risk assessments protected me pretty well up to now. Unless it was just luck

It certainly brings you back to what a great thing the opposable thumb is, though, being robbed of the use of one for a while.

Penalties Bill clears another hurdle

The private member's Bill which aims to increase the penalties magistrates can levy for health and safety offences has just passed another stage on the way to becoming law. It's unusual for a member-sponsored Bill to get this far.

If it eventually gains Royal Assent without too many changes Labour MP Keith Hill's Health and Safety (Offences) Bill would raise the ceiling on fines in magistrates courts for breaching safety regulations such as the Work at Height Regs or PUWER from £5000 to £20,000 (the level they can only apply at present to offences under the Health and Safety at Work Act). It would also make imprisonment a possible sentence for this sort of offence.

The Bill has been around in other incarnations but all of them have failed at earlier fences. Now it's passed dicussion in the Public Bills Committee, it now has to go for report followed by a third reading in the Commons before it passes to the House of Lords.If it goes the distance this time it should bolster the message sent by the corporate manslaughter legislation that the law is firming up on health and safety offences.

HSC chair talks tough on directors' duties

I met the Health and Safety Commission chair Judith Hackitt this week and she says she doesn't think businesses are taking the voluntary guidance on directors' safety duties issued by the Institute of Directors seriously enough. She pointed out that the HSC has said it will review the possibility of creating a legal duty for board members to monitor and manage safety performance if it doesn't think the voluntary route is working.

Getting your press release past an editor

I was talking yesterday to the head of one of the big training certification bodies about how to increase the chance of their press releases getting into the pages of the professional press.

I thought it might be useful to set down the way it works for me, in case anyone reading who represents a commercial supplier was wondering.

If a press release is about some milestone for your company (millionth order, expansion into a new region, new product), it isn't material for our news pages. Put bluntly, it's very newsworthy to you but probably not to the majority of health and safety managers. There are trade publications that will carry that material as news, but not the professional mags. Apart from anything else, we get up to 30 releases of that type every day; we'd never have room.

But if you are just keen to get your organisation's name in the news pages, that's not so difficult. The trick is to give journalists a hook they recognise as news. It's a bit like tricking cats to eat their worm pills; crush up the corporate info and hide it in some chunks of appetising newsworthy information. I think i'll leave that analogy while the going's good.

So the fleet maintenance company that commissions a survey (and a proper survey, not just 30 companies) that finds one in three company cars is not properly roadworthy, is going to get a mention because that's a great bit of information to put in front of our readers. They look good for warning people, and so do we.

err, that's it.

Chemical labelling and COSHH assessments

I'm at the IOSH conference in Telford (globetrotter me) and just sat through a good presentation on the REACH chemicals regulation by Dr Ross Fielding of Harman Technology who knows his stuff and, unusually for this topic, didn't hide behind the letter of the Regulation but talked about its likely implications for health and safety practitioners.

But his most interesting point wasn't actually about REACH but the UN's GHS proposal for a global system for labelling chemicals. GHS is pretty certain to be phased in by 2015 with one of the phases involving running the new labelling standard alongside the existing one.

Karman pointed out this means that this means that all safety data sheets will have to be replaced at least twice in the next seven years.

"Any significant change triggers a new COSHH risk assessment," he said. "And a change to the safety data sheet is a significant change."

So that will give COSHH dutyholders something to keep them busy.

Dame Carol Black's review due next week

Just got an invitiation to the launch of Carol Black's much anticipated review (of the health of the working age population) which is... next Monday. So we'll get to find out if what i thought she was saying here was actually in the report.

Sense behind a fire extinguisher ban

Lots of coverage in the nationals today of landlords taking extinguishers out of blocks of flats in Bournemouth on the say-so of their fire risk assessors. There's speculation that it will be copied across the country. My heart sinks, because it's going to be so easy for the usual suspects to spin this as more health and safety gone mad.

But there's sense in the assessors' thinking. In the fire marshal training programme it runs for employers, the London Fire Brigade won't teach marshals how to use extinguishers. Their argument is that under pressure people are not going to take time to read the labels and check they've got the right type of extinguisher (using water on an oil/fat fire will turn you into a fireball) and having extinguishers sitting there gives people a false sense of confidence that they can fight something they should really be running away from.

Underlying this is the fact employers are in a kind of limbo about fire precautions since the Fire Safety Order scrapped the old system of fire brigades signing off premises. Now nobody can give them a certificate to assure them they are on the right side of the law. The fire brigades themselves aren't much help in many cases, because if you ask them how to make your premises compliant, they more-or-less say "do a risk assessment, put in the controls it suggests and, if you have a fire, we'll tell you if it was right when we decide whether we are going to prosecute you."

This is going to make for a lot of caution on the part of employers, landlords and anyone else in charge of premises and the fire assessors they contract. Stripping out the fire extinguishers may just be the start.

Health, work and wellbeing conference

That's where I am, in Birmingham. And among the things i've learnt today are:

• In the US Ford spends more on employee healthcare than on components/raw materials for its vehicles.
• If you start at Westminster on the London underground's Jubilee Line and travel to Stratford in the East, average life expectancy of the population is one year lower at every station.
• The UK Olympic Delivery Authority completed the biggest tunnelling operation in Europe recently, moving underground the powerlines which criss-crossed the 2012 site. The only reportable accident they had involved a worker breaking his toe. As Lawrence Waterman, head of heath and safety at the ODA pointed out, tunnelling was once seen as so hazardous they used to talk about the norm being "a death a mile".

Greenpeace at risk

I've thought this before with Fathers for Justice and now again here: there seems to be a lamentable lack of thought given to fall-arrest precautions in modern protest.

And I've a sneaking feeling the hi-vis vests were only to get them through security.

Corporate manslaughter confusion

The corporate killing law, due in six weeks odd, seems to be exciting lots of business activity, but not always for the right reasons it seems. I was talking to a safety product supplier yesterday who said his order books were full and that businesses were upping the level of employee protection "because all these directors are afraid they could end up in prison".

If that's so they needn't worry, the whole point of the law is that it takes away the need to find a guilty person who said "we'll save a bit of money if we stop buying fall-arrest harnesses" in front of witnesses.

If the authorities investigating a fatality find the health and safety structure, systems and training were inadequate the new law allows them to go after a whole organisation. Nobody will go to prison (not for corporate manslughter, anyway).

But what directors should be fretting about, and are in big busineses, is the level of fines that could be imposed if a corporate killing charge sticks. The sentencing guidelines for judges are still to be finalised, but the recommendation from the Sentencing Advisory Panel is for fines up to 10% of turnover, which is enough to make your average executive board's eyes water.

Refurbishment blitz, right or wrong?

Construction union UCATT is complaining that the HSE's heavily trailed blitz of spot checks on 1000 building refurbishment sites this month is a "sticking plaster" and that a flurry of one-off checks (especially when you've warned people you are coming) is no substitute for a full programme of inspections throughout the year.

I reckon the HSE would argue that with stretched resources, the drive to cut deaths and injuries in refurbishment (which accounted for more than half last year's construction fatalities) is best executed through an initiative that might scare small builders into cleaning up their act, on the basis they might be targeted this month.

I can see both sides. The refurb contractors know that even if they shouldn't risk bad behaviour this month, they face little risk of inspection if they drop standards again afterwards. But the HSE has to get maximum bang for its enforcement buck and just doesn't have the inspectors to get round even a big minority of construction sites.

Health and safety defended

I realise that after the last posting this blog risks becoming a listings guide to BBC radio after the fact, but all i do when i'm not at work is sit in a darkened room with a transistor and biscuits, and besides Radio 4 does seem to have the closest thing to a media backlash against the health-and-safety-gone-mad frothings of Jeremy Clarkson that we are going to get. Some comfort there.

From the News Quiz last Friday :

Sandy Toksvig: Andy, where were tossers tied up in red tape?

Andy Hamilton: This is a health and safety story from the Daily Telegraph, on its health and safety page. And like all health and safety safety stories, when you read the fine print it isn't a health and safety story, but the spin the papers put on it was that a pancake tossing race in Rippon had to be ditched because of health and safety fears. And you can see their point, frying pans can inflict horrendous injuries - you just have to look at Tom and Jerry. But I think it was as much a problem that they had to close roads, and I suspect people sat down and said "Shall we do the pancake race?" "No, it's bollocks. We only do it for the tourists, and it's February."

Phil Hammond: Surprisingly, I feel quite sorry for the Health and Safety Executive, because they were contacted and they hadn't said anything about it at all. It's the catch-all excuse isn't it? "I'd love to marry you darling, but health and safety" Or "I'd love your mother to move in with us, but health and safety".

Rail maintenance falling short?

There was a good programme on BBC Radio 4 this week investigating Network Rail's track maintenance and inspection procedures

After the Grayrigg derailment in February last year, NetworkRail's own investigation highlighted problems with track inspection teams missing some defects and finding others, only for nothing to happen when they reported them. Network Rail insisted these failings were local to Grayrigg.

But the BBC has got hold of an unpublished report by the Railway Inspectorate which carried out its own investigation into track inspection and maintenance across the UK after the derailment.

The report talks about "the resource of track gangs" being stretched further and further by limited resources, which meant that inexperienced staff end up patrolling track, and that there's a risk of defects going undetected. The inspectorate issued a formal notice to Network Rail to improve track patrolling system by end of March this year.

Network Rail's chief exec denies there is a general problem with the patrolling system resting on the fact that HMRI's report says the "indicative" of systemic failings rather than an stating it as absolute certainty.

His argument isn't supported by reports by the Rail Accident Investigation Branch into three derailments in late 2006 near Waterloo and Epsom (which weren't widely reported because they were at low speed and no-one was injured), which also highlight as causes inadequate inspection procedures and fatigue among overworked track patrollers.

The programme suggests that if the problem is national rather than local, it may be down to Network Rail's maintenance budget cuts which are running at 8% a year under the direction of the Office of Rail Regulation, which is economic regulator for the industry but also took over responsibility for rail safety from the HSE in 2006.

It's worth a listen and will be available on the BBC Radio website till 12 January
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/progs/listenagain.shtml - go to File on 4. The material on track safety starts about 15 mins in, and handily the Radio 4 player has a "Fwd 15 mins" button.

Hans Monderman 1945-2008

A quick word in honour of Hans Monderman who died last month aged 62. He was a pioneer of sensible risk in road safety in the Netherlands, going against the orthodoxy that pedestrians and vehicles have to be separated at all costs and that straightening the raods and putting up lots of speed limit signs was what made the roads safer.

Monderman showed that drivers responded to less strict direction (fewer traffic lights and road markings for instance) by taking more responsibility themselves and driving more attentively. His idea of the "naked street" where drivers negotiate with each other and pedestrians has begun to influence policy here as well as elsewhere in Europe, simply because it improves road safety.

Safety in the near east

Just been sent some pictures from Eastern European states (I'm guessing ex-Soviet Union or the poorer satellites like Romania) in a viral email, including some humorous ones on a safety theme. The one with the apples is particularly pretty.

Machine guarding

We're working on a feature on machine guarding and it's reminded me of something an HSE inspector once told me.

He had come across a machine in a bakery where the workers had carefully cut a hole in the wire mesh designed to stop them putting their hands near some fast spinning rotors. Then someone had lined the edges of the wire with padding, to make sure nobody cut their hand reaching in.

Risk and Regulation Advisory Council

On the homepage of the government's new Risk and Regulation Advisory Council, launched last week, the introductory blurb runs:

"On taking office as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown committed to taking the Better Regulation agenda to a new level by focusing upstream at where policy-making engages with risk. This is the critical starting-point of the regulatory process. It is here that culture and process must achieve a better understanding of public risk."

Does anybody have an idea what that means? Any suggestions gratefully accepted. I hope it's not code for "there are a lot of stories in the Daily Express knocking the Nanny State, we've got to be seen to be doing something".

Death of a thousand cuts?

The TUC has just published its submission to the short inquiry into the HSE's work by the House of Commons Select Committee on Work and Pensions. The memo makes some good points about the 5% budget cut the executive is expected to make every year till 2011, on top of previous reductions. The statistics aren't new but they gain strength by being collected together and pithily stated. Here's a few excerpts:

"Since 1997, the UK workforce has increased by around 9%. In addition the number of premises that the HSE inspect has gone up by well over 20%. Yet the HSE's workforce has shrunk from over 4,000 to its current number of less than 3,500..."

"The administrative cuts that have taken place have already led to inspectors having less back up and having to reduce the amount of frontline work they do. This has already affected the service that the HSE gives. In the past 4 years the number of inspections fell by 25% while the number of prosecutions fell by 49%. "

"There are more traffic wardens in London than there are inspectors in the whole of HSE's Field Operations Directorate for the whole of Great Britain. It is estimated that the actual number of FOD inspectors is around 700 to cover all the inspections, investigations and prosecutions for all manufacturing (except chemicals manufacturing), the health services, education, all local authority activities, Govt departments and agencies, fire and police services, the defence industry and MOD, agriculture, fairgrounds, domestic gas safety, utilities, ports and docks, and others.

"...the number of inspections has fallen from 116,652 in 1996/7 to 55,195 in 2004/05."

"...under 20% of major injuries are investigated, and under 5% of 'over three day injuries' are investigated"

"The number of prosecutions has fallen from 1986 in 2001/2 to 1141 in 2006/07, although there was a welcome increase in the past year."

This is just the status quo. In an interview with HSW magazine last year, HSE chief Geoffrey Podger said he believed they had absorbed the cuts to date, but that any more would really affect their ability to operate.

This should bother anyone in business who is trying to comply with safety regulations and safeguard their workers. The erosion of an effective enforcement regime threatens them because it gives a competitive advantage to businesses in their sectors who choose to save money by playing fast and loose with employee's health and safety.

The TUC's full submission is at www.tuc.org.uk/h_and_s/tuc-14176-f0.cfm

Parcel of rogues

I was talking to an HSE inspector today for background to a prosecution we'll be reporting soon. We were agreeing that the information was unlikely to be practical use to most readers of HSW magazine or this website since, by a process of self-selection, they've shown an interest in protecting their workers. They can benefit from the hard lessons of other reputable companies who let standards slip in some area, but not from the out-and-out knaves.

(This prosecution involves a polish worker on a construction project crushed by a two-tonne floor slab. The client and the contractor - both companies owned by the same man - had no health and safety policies, no risk assessments or method statements no construction plan and didn't give the workers any protective equipment. They never reported the accident and denied it when the HSE found out by other means. The cherry on the cake is that the company didn't even have planning permission to put the building up in the first place - the local council will decide later this month if it should be torn down.)

The inspector suggested that, even if our readers in construction or any other sector are unlikely to learn much from the details of these companies' failings, this sort of case is well worth reporting because (and i agree with this) it's important for companies who are doing the right thing to see that the HSE is not just going after them for small infringements, but is seriousl y interested in getting the rogues out of the sector.