World Class Health and Safety

The professional's guide

Richard Byrne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317292296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Industrial Health & Safety
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Getting your qualification is just the start of the safety professional's journey towards effective workplace practice. World Class Health and Safety doesn't repeat the whys and whats of health and safety management, instead it is a helpful how-to guide for newly qualified and experienced health and safety professionals to get the best out of their knowledge, experience and the people they work with. This book is filled with practical examples that bring the subject to life, covering the skills and techniques you need to be a leader of safety, overcome inaction and make lasting positive changes to safety performance and culture – enabling more people to go home safe every day. World Class Health and Safety teaches the reader to:

• work efficiently and effectively with senior managers and budget holders to implement the wider corporate social responsibility agenda

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• emphasize the 'value-added' benefits of good health and safety management clearly and simply

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• create effective and engaging training

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• use monitoring and audits to get the best out of the resources available

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World Class Health and Safety is essential reading for those wishing to invest in their own professional development, to communicate effectively and to understand and deliver safety in the wider business context, wherever in the world they might be working.

Part 1

Understanding the climate

To succeed ultimately as a safety professional, whatever the role, whatever the organisation, in whatever part of the world, you need to have more tools in your kit bag than just your technical knowledge (as important as this is). In the first two chapters we will explore where health and safety fits into organisational life and society in general. It is important to understand this context and the climate we presently find ourselves in because it is from this base that future chapters build.

In very recent years in the UK there has been an acceptance that there is too much health and safety regulation which is hindering economic growth and ironically not always making workplaces safer or healthy for those it seeks to protect. Yet as the timeline in Figure P1.1 shows, over the last 25 years or so, there appears to be a correlation (although understandably lagging) between the workplace fatality rate (1) and when key pieces of legislation have been introduced.

Figure P1.1 Timeline showing UK workplace fatality rate and the introduction of key health and safety legislation (dates are approximate); taken from (1)

What this means is that there is a place for legislation and rules, yet to achieve health and safety excellence you need to move beyond these if you are ever to get anything other than simply compliance. This is nothing new. Indeed, if you consider any model of safety culture evolution, then you always start with putting controls in place like rules, laws, things that if broken can result in punishment. It is only over time do people work safely ‘by choice’ because of that conditioning.

Arguably, once you have your safety qualification you can ‘do compliance’, but to move further you need to be flexible and have different tools to use in different situations. If not, you run the very real risk of becoming stereotyped as a ‘clipboard and cagoule wearing health and safety bod’, which is the image the media likes to portray.

However, the world of health and safety is starting to change. It is more common for it to be talked about in the same organisational circles as other aspects of corporate social responsibility like diversity, ethical procurement and environmental management. To some in the profession this is a worry, a change to the status quo that they do not like. While there is a place for these people in the profession, like the compliance driven professionals, they stand to limit their career as a result if they are not careful.

Reference

1 Available at: www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/history/historical-picture.pdf (accessed 14 November 2015).

Chapter 1

Clipboard and cagoule

If you say ‘health and safety’ to people these days, it conjures up a picture of unnecessary rules and a bunch of clipboard and cagoule-wearing people stopping you doing something – at least that is what the media would have you believe. In this chapter we will look at how this perception has been built up and how, at times, people in the safety profession have not helped themselves. It is only once armed with this knowledge that we can tackle this commonly held belief.

A potted history of health and safety

The principles of health and safety or, perhaps more accurately, risk management have been with us since our ancestors were living in caves; they had to learn how to avoid or overcome wild animals that would harm them. Throughout time as well, we have seen people clad in armour in order to protect themselves from harm during times of conflict. It is only in the very recent past (the last hundred years or so) that whole body armour has become used less as combat methods have advanced.

Modern workplace health and safety has its roots firmly set in the Industrial Revolution when, after mounting pressure, the government of the day introduced prescriptive legislation in 1802 to look after the interests of children working in the cotton and wool mills throughout the UK, which was called the Health and Morales of Apprentices Act. The first factory inspectors, though, were not introduced until much later and no doubt amid much resistance from employers. Around the developed world, health and safety at work had similar birth stories.

• In the US they experienced a large number of fatalities relating to coupling and uncoupling railway units, and the application and release of railroad car brakes. Eventually, the Railroad Safety Appliances Act 1893 was introduced to provide an improved and common standard for coupling and braking mechanisms across the country.

• In 1884, Germany was the first country to introduce a worker’s compensation scheme when Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck made a successful argument that people should be helped by the state if they had been injured at work.

• The province of Ontario in Canada set up a government department in 1919 to develop and enforce, among other legislation, that related to workplace health and safety.

For quite some time legislation had been prescriptive and widespread talk (let alone acceptance) of concepts like safety culture were nothing but a pipe dream, as action through compliance was the name of the game in many cases. It was not until the 1970s that the current workplace health and safety ethos came about. In America, President Nixon introduced the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1971, which required employers to maintain a working environment free from recognised hazards and comply with various other regulations. It is still the principal piece of occupational health and safety legislation in the US.

In 1974, the UK’s landmark legislation, the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act, was introduced. This, still current, legislation became more goal setting – not telling people what to do in specific terms (save for a few areas), instead outlining the principles employers and employees were expected to follow in order to achieve the goal of getting risks to safety and health to as low as reasonably practical.

This Act was a complete reversal of the existing approach and changed the way in which industry viewed health and safety. The tack was clear: ‘it is your business, manage it how you see fit, but if you get it wrong the come-back will be severe.’ The change from being prescriptive to being prospective is critical and was the idea of Lord Robens and the committee he chaired in 1972. They found that there was too much apathy towards health and safety and those businesses that took it seriously and engaged with the subject tended to be more prosperous than those that did it because they had to or did not do it at all.

During the early 1990s, through the European Union, all member countries moved to comply with six directives (which in the UK resulted in the ‘6 pack’). Among other things these introduced the absolute need to undertake formal risk assessments where work activities pose a significant risk to safety and health.

Such legislation, typically in the form of regulations, takes the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act and makes it clearer to employers what their responsibilities are towards the issue they are concerned with. For example, the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) regulations add more meat to the bones of the general duties of the Health and Safety at Work Act, particularly the need to have a safe means of access and egress, facilities for welfare and the like.

The introduction of such regulations, as well as having a positive effect on reducing incidences of harm, also means that the legislation is becoming more prescriptive without ‘going the whole hog’ and, of course, if it is very clear what organisations need to do and they do not do it, it is easier to convince a court to convict.

Since 1974 there has really been only two pieces of health and safety legislation that have been true landmarks. We have already touched on the ‘6 Pack’ which introduced the influential Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations. More recently, in 2007 the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act was brought in to clean up the route to prosecution where fatal accidents occurred and to make it harder for organisations to hide when things went wrong.

Since then in the UK there have been two prominent reports into health and safety legislation and its effects on business. The first was written by Lord Young (1) in 2010 and recommended a number of practical steps the UK government could take to make health and safety become more accessible and reduce the burden on business. The second, in 2011, was written by Professor Ragnor Loftstedt (2) which, while acknowledging the principles of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act, were sound and still fit for purpose some 35 years on made a persuasive argument to readdress the balance between what the law requires and sensible risk management. Specifically he found that:

• The main problem with the legislation is the way it is interpreted and applied; there was inconsistent enforcement and third parties promoting an approach which generated an unnecessary amount of paperwork.

• Not every piece of legislation contributes, from a risk and evidence perspective, to a safe and healthy workplace.

• The UK goes beyond EU requirements for self-employed people, and they should only have to follow such approaches if they are involved in high-risk activities or can harm others in the course of their work.

• The meaning of the widely used phrase of ‘so far as reasonably practical’ is not well understood in small business.

• Risk assessment has turned into a bureaucratic nightmare, leading to lengthy documents being created to cover every possible risk rather than focusing on those of significance.

• The Approved Codes of Practice that accompany legislation, while viewed as helpful, are too long for employers to find the information they need.

• The EU’s influence over the UK’s health and safety legislation is too great, costly and not always useful, meaning that we should base our views of what becomes legislation using more objective measures of risk and evidence.

• Business feels overwhelmed by the requirements of legislation and it should be consolidated and made more industry sector specific, which would enable a 35 per cent reduction in regulations.

It does not matter which part of the world you are working in, the concepts outlined by both Young and Loftstedt are applicable to all safety professionals and the organisations they work for. The overriding message is that health and safety should make your business slicker, smarter, faster; if it doesn’t, you should question whether if what you want to do is worth it.

As we have already seen, the UK has some of the best safety performance in Europe and arguably the world. While there are several reasons for this, including the UK’s enforcement regime, societal expectations and the change in UK industry from the more traditional heavier industries to retail and services, one thing is clear: the need for thinking that enables business and the economy to grow while protecting people’s safety and health is vitally important.

While other countries might lag behind the UK in their safety performance and expectations, organisations in the West often take their approach to safety with them when they move into markets in less developed countries and typically expect similar standards when they look to appoint organisations into their supply chain. This approach is driven mainly through the expectation of their investors and public perception and is explored in more detail in Chapter 2. This type of approach is helping the safety message to spread even when the rest of the countries’ shared beliefs are not quite there yet.

The media

It is perhaps little surprise that the newspaper press often print stories of health and safety gone mad, after all such stories have all the hallmarks of a great read. They are easy to tell and to understand, topical and involve lots of people a...