The Health and Safety Executive for Northern Ireland (HSENI) has raised concerns that too many apprentice electricians accept electric shocks and burns as part and parcel of their work.
During a recent presentation to apprentices in the trade, the regulator’s John Wright was alarmed that more than a third of the audience said they had received an electric shock in their workplace, and that many of them accepted it as an inevitable consequence of working in their role.
The HSENI warns that this culture of acceptance suggests serious gaps in safe working practices in the electrical industry and could result in the serious injury or death of an apprentice if they continue to work in the same manner.
Following his presentation, Wright remarked that the onus not only rests with employers but with electricians themselves to take proactive steps to change this culture.
He explained: “Employers must ensure the safety of all employees, so far as is reasonably practicable. And, in the case of apprentices, they need to ensure they have enough technical knowledge and experience so as not to put themselves or others in danger while carrying out their work. This is about competence, and an apprentice – by definition – is going to be less competent than an experienced tradesman.”
Wright stressed the importance of supervision, even for ‘competent’ electricians, as employers have a duty to carry out monitoring to ensure that essential safe isolation procedures are properly followed.
“As an employer, ask yourself where your apprentices are learning bad practice – it’s certainly not in the classroom,” continued Wright. “And, ask yourself if you’ve checked that your electricians are following safe practice, and that they are demonstrating it to their apprentices?”
“Also, as a contractor, you can’t employ non-competent tradesmen for electrical installation work. Not only is there danger during the installation itself, owing to a lack of technical knowledge and experience, but there is danger to others from fire, or electrocution, if a latent electrical defect emerges some time after the building is handed over. These matters are also breaches of the Electricity at Work Regulations.”
The Electrical Safety Council (ESC) conceded that a mentality of acceptance of electrical shocks exists in the industry and is putting lives at risk.
The organisation’s head of technical development, Martyn Allen, said: “In recent years there has been a number of prosecutions that have highlighted the extreme dangers of working when electrical systems are live. If apprentices are accepting the risk of electric shocks then they are accepting poor safety standards and bad practice.
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The judge who sentenced my wee brother’s employer to a £300,000 fine for the safety failings which killed him, referred to the industry’s “macho culture”. His employer failed to provide suitable locking off devices, they failed to ensure adherence to safe isolation procedures, & my 26-yr-old brother was killed when he cut through a wire marked “not in use”. If sparks & their employers are to understand the awful reality of what electric shock can do, put someone like me in front of them.