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".