The waste industry and health and safety professionals are developing a series of initiatives to help small-to-medium-sized enterprises improve their safety practices. Susan Relf explains.
In 2009, HSE launched a strategy paper to promote health and safety across UK industries and encouraged businesses to sign up and pledge their commitment to “be part of the solution”.
Like other sectors, the waste industry is determined to deliver healthier and safer workplaces. However, it’s a diverse sector and one that is constantly changing.
While the size of businesses varies considerably, small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) — especially micro businesses with less than 15 employees —form an integral part of the sector.
Research indicates that smaller businesses often find attendance at the regular conferences a challenge when resources such as money and staff are limited. A conference is often a common medium for exchanging and sharing best practice; consequently this can mean the smaller SMEs miss out on valuable shared safety and health knowledge and practice.
Even so, it’s vital that these important players are not left out of the safety equation. Although, encouragingly, HSE statistics for waste and recycling reflect a downward trend in the rate of injuries recorded over the last eight years, it remains a high-risk industry.
The Waste Industry Safety and Health (WISH) forum was formed 10 years ago to support the waste and recycling industry in its health and safety challenges. WISH consists of representatives from inside and outside the industry, including trade bodies, professional organisations, trade unions and training bodies, as well as national and local government bodies, including HSE.
Over the past decade, WISH has produced an extensive range of waste management specific guidance; conducted research into emergent health and safety issues; provided advice to the industry on specific issues and acted as the central point for health and safety initiatives across the waste sector.
Back in February 2013, the WISH forum teamed up with HSE and held a joint strategy summit, which was attended by representatives from across the industry, the main aim being to develop key goals to improve health and safety standards across waste management and support a workforce culture for healthier and safer workplaces.
The industry continues to recognise that there is a need for better support for SMEs in order to create these healthier and safer workplaces. One of the main aims of the summit was the setting up of a working group to garner from SMEs what they required in terms of support.
The working group needs this feedback to ensure that any support it provides is relevant. In particular, it requires feedback from the micro businesses, which remain relatively invisible until something goes wrong.
In December last year, eight volunteers drawn from businesses such as skip hire, waste management and recycling, construction and demolition waste met at Agrivert’s head office in Oxfordshire to look at possible solutions.
The meeting’s focus was to make sure that any initiatives developed were tapped into by the wider community and to identify the smaller groups that would benefit from improved signposting on what is already available as support. It also looked at what additional tools might be useful to support training and knowledge building.
As well as working on micro SME-focused, accessible pocket guidance and self-assessment tools, the working group is currently in the process of developing a ‘landing page’ with the assistance of EU Skills, which is being designed as a ‘one-stop-shop’ for SMEs in the sector. The page will include links to tried and tested training, chat forums to share good practice and links to funding to assist training.
Over the past year, it has also been developing an initiative with Safety Groups UK (SGUK), which is the coordinating body for a network of voluntary occupational health and safety groups located throughout the UK.
By setting up a waste sector area focused on facilitating and coordinating local groups, they provide a forum for smaller SMEs to exchange business ideas and share solutions.
This formula has been very successful at a local level with general groups across the wider economy, so the same formula would be copied but bespoke to waste. The groups will be coordinated to provide effective networking opportunities to develop meaningful partnerships with local regulators and to help SMEs, especially the micro-sized.
The network of new waste groups will provide an ideal forum to receive relevant information from trade associations, regulators and interested associated professional bodies.
The working group is also liaising with a number of the larger waste companies that are willing to share their own corporate safety material. Support from the ‘big players’ that already recognise the need to encourage their smaller contractors to follow good practice is well known.
Micro SMEs frequently require assistance with completing risk assessments and method statements to ensure they are suitable and sufficient. They often overlook ‘health’ from the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 and fail to see the commercial gains that can be achieved by improving the reputation and culture of their business. By keeping the spotlight on the areas that professionals recognise are a concern, we are raising the bar throughout the industry.
Healthier and safer workplaces must remain the way we do business across all sectors, across all teams — no worker’s health and safety is less important, no matter the size of the enterprise.
Susan Relf is compliance director for Agrivert Ltd
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