“Risk is a two-way street,” delegates at the SHP Legal Arena were told today (15 May) during a packed session on the responsibilities and pitfalls of managing contractors.
Ron Reid, a solicitor at Shoosmiths led practitioners through a number of key issues that crop up regularly in prosecutions and warned clients that they should not only be asking themselves what risks their contractors are bringing on site but what risks they, as clients, need to be making their contractors informed about.
He reminded the audience that all information on risks should be sufficiently incorporated into risk assessments and method statements, stressing that, with the former, risk assessments should be specific to the task concerned. Generic risk assessments are “good servants, but bad masters”, he said, as he warned against an over-reliance on them.
Moving on to permits to work, Ron emphasised the importance of personal liability, noting that the last year has seen a record number of prosecutions taken against individuals. So, if you sign a permit to work, “make sure you know exactly what is happening and get things nailed down”, he warned.
Using a football analogy, he suggested that clients should not hesitate to show contractors a ‘yellow card’, or, in certain serious situations, a ‘red card’ and ban them completely from carrying out the work until they are managing it in a safe fashion and have tight controls in place.
He went on to provide a checklist for effective contractor management, highlighting the importance of agreeing a safe system of work and robust channels of communication and cooperation between parties on site. The client also needs to ensure the contractor has the appropriate skills and instructions and is adequately supervised, he added.
The client should also reassure themselves that any plant and equipment the contractor uses is safe for the job in hand and that they have the necessary test certificates. Ad-hoc loaning of equipment is another common problem, explained Ron.
On the training side, Ron recounted a story of how one company’s policy to stick a sticker on workers’ hard hats to prove they have been inducted on site went awry when an already inducted worker couldn’t make it in one day and gave another worker who hadn’t been through the induction his hard hat. The substitute worker had a serious accident and the company was prosecuted as a result.
Ron closed his session by identifying a number of HSE investigation trends in this area. Firstly, stressed Ron, the HSE investigate health and safety systems, not topics, unless they are carrying out a proactive campaign. Inspectors want to see real ownership of risk assessment and take a dim view of clients or contractors trying to wriggle out of their responsibilities by ‘outsourcing’ the risk.
Increasingly, inspectors want to see worker involvement in the risk-assessment process and are quite likely, during their investigations, to ask employees what involvement they have had, he added.
Another deep concern is a failure to quality-control risk assessments. Ron urged delegates to ensure they have risk assessments up to date and that any amendments to them have been communicated to the necessary parties. And despite, regular messages from government that it does not want companies to be overburdened by paperwork, they will still be expected to produce records and evidence that they have implemented safe measures and controls if an incident does occur.
