Steve Hails has been a leader on some of the UK’s largest construction projects including Crossrail and currently Tideway. He is a key speaker at many health and safety events, helping to raise issues of health in construction. In this interview, Steve talks about the impact which clients have on health, safety and wellbeing. He believes that “clients have an essential role to play in setting the bar.”
The impact clients have on setting expectations is varied and mixed,” he continued. “I think raising the bar is essential, but where we are falling short is the lack of consistency, and that lack of consistency is creating inefficiencies within the supply chain.”
Steve goes on to talk about how behavioural safety programmes are not working as well as they could do. He says that they are: “A bit like health and safety passports and CSCS cards. They’ve kind of just grown with time, and we haven’t again embraced that to have a consistent approach. So that’s certainly one area where I think we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
The interview culminates with some advice from Steve on whether practitioners should consider a behavioural safety programme within their business.
Irwin & Colton is a specialist Health and Safety recruitment company, based in the South East of England and recruit across the UK. They recruit all roles in the health and safety industry from Health and Safety Advisor, through to Health and Safety Director positions.
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Steve as always delivers a very reasoned approach. Having worked with him at Siemens nearly 10 years ago, his ethos was and still is, from listening to the byte, balanced.