Small firms and big issues are preoccupying the HSE’s Philip White, who was quizzed by Andrew Sansom on the HSE’s approach to regulating construction in what are turbulent and stormy times for the sector and the economy.
Britain is basking in some of the hottest temperatures of the year – and it’s almost October! Given the dreary summers that seem to be par for the course these days, if a similar mass of high pressure develops and sits itself over London in late July and early August next year, then it might be considered Lord Coe’s biggest coup of the 2012 Olympics.
Head of the HSE’s construction division Philip White might disagree on that point, though – having helped the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) mastermind one of the most impressive – some might say, the most impressive – construction projects ever, in terms of health and safety. So, will the HSE ever see the health and safety performance of the Olympics big build replicated elsewhere in Britain, or even surpassed?
“In terms of what we’ve experienced in my time at HSE, and no doubt before that, it’s as good as it’s got so far at one level,” says White. “But you can always improve on things, and there are lessons that have been learned down there, in terms of what can be rolled forward for other projects.”
Those projects include Glasgow’s hosting of the Commonwealth Games in 2014; the London Crossrail engineering initiative; and the new nuclear-build scheme at Hinkley Point. The Olympics Learning Legacy programme is now in full swing, too, with plans in place to share the lessons learned on the project with the wider industry – from special roadshow-style events to disseminating research commissioned in partnership with other organisations, including IOSH.
Legacy challenge
So, can the Olympics inspire a further improvement in the UK’s construction health and safety record? It’s not a given, as there are already some worrying developments in the industry, and potentially more on the horizon. Provisional statistics for 2010/11, for example, suggest that workplace deaths in the sector have risen by about 15 per cent.
“There are several issues here,” stresses White. “Firstly, the previous year was a record low. I think the other thing is you have to look at fatalities over a longer timeframe than just one year to see if there’s a real trend in what’s happening.
“That’s not to say we shouldn’t be vigilant about what the statistics are telling us. But we shouldn’t say immediately: this is a reflection of government policy. You can’t yet make those sort of judgements, so we’re going to have to look at how things will pan out over a two or three-year period.”
The ministerial statement, Good health and safety, good for everyone,1 published in March this year, committed the HSE to cutting overall inspections by a third, and its spending by 35 per cent over the next four years. However, construction is a priority area for the HSE, so White’s division can expect to receive “relative protection” over that period.
“Our regulation and intervention in the industry is not just about inspection and enforcement by inspectors,” he explains. “Obviously, that’s core, but there are a number of other staff, including inspectors, who do a range of work to influence the industry so we get improved outcomes.”
Small change
While White insists that proactive construction inspections will remain at a relatively steady level, and will certainly not be reduced by a third – a target that relates to the HSE’s overall programme – he does concede that there will be more focus on small to medium-sized projects, and “proportionately less effort” directed towards larger companies.
He points out that ten years ago, between 60 and 70 per cent of the fatal accidents in construction occurred on notifiable sites under the CDM Regulations, whereas now, 60 to 70 per cent of fatalities are on smaller sites, many of which are non-notifiable projects. The regulator, he says, must therefore react accordingly to what the evidence is telling it.
“I was speaking to a major contractor recently, who had 150 site visits from HSE inspectors in 2010,” he recalls. “None of those resulted in enforcement. They had two letters sent on matters that needed raising, but not enforcement. The question I would ask is: is that the best use of our resources when, if we visited 150 small projects, we would probably serve enforcement notices on a quarter to a third of those sites?
“I think where risk is well managed and we’re confident about that, why should we be carrying on reinforcing that? We should be going to where risk is not well managed.”
But if the HSE is going to be seeing less of the larger, well-performing companies, isn’t it cutting off a vital point of entry to reach smaller contractors? “Not true at all,” retorts White. “We will see large duty-holders because we will be inspecting where they carry out refurbishment; it’s one of our main target areas. We will still deal with reactive work on their projects but we are going to tackle them centrally at board level.”
Supply-chain management is now a principle embedded in the work of many of the larger players, argues White, but there is still an opportunity for them to exert even more influence over their delivery chain. He explains: “I think the challenge for these large organisations is: what can you do to help health and safety across the industry by working outside of your supply chain. For example, could you mentor some small local businesses, who you would never ever engage; could you sponsor, or participate in the Working Well Together initiative.
“So it’s a matter of challenging them to take a broader look at health and safety across the industry. It’s challenging them to step outside of the supply chain because they do a lot of good work already with their [suppliers].”
Rita’s relevance
White also sees this work as part of the HSE’s ongoing commitment to certain recommendations laid out by Rita Donaghy in her 2009 report on improving health and safety in construction. Stressing that the report is still very much alive, while accepting that some of the recommendations – such as more inspectors and statutory directors’ duties – have been “overtaken by events”, he says: “There are a lot of things where work is going on. So, for example, the recommendation that the industry should continue to support partnership work through the supply chain. . . We also have a number of projects where we try to get the supply chain to work to improve a particular process.
“The review of the number of fatal accidents – there was a recommendation to continue that on an annual basis. We are taking that forward to understand and analyse fatals in much more depth than we have before, to see what lessons are there. So, I would suggest that there’s quite a lot of this that is very pertinent, which we are carrying forward.”
Influencing indirectly via larger companies’ supply chains isn’t the only route to reach smaller contractors, and White sees the national agreement with the Building Control Alliance, which was signed in September last year, as an example of the type of work the HSE is doing to get its message across to smaller businesses.
Says White: “We’ve taken a few prosecutions against smaller sites, where we’ve had information passed back to us by building control officers (BCOs).2 All that work depends on our visiting officers making contact with local authorities, which provide a large chunk of building control services – liaising with them to get their commitment, and sometimes working with the people dealing with the Building Regulations applications to get information and intelligence about where smaller sites are, so inspectors can go and visit them.”
He says there is no danger of BCOs being over-zealous in the advice that they give, as they are acting as ‘guides to information’, not as replacement inspectors. “We’re not asking them to be a health and safety professional,” says White. “We’re asking them to signpost contractors to information, or, for that matter, we can provide BCOs with information sheets to provide advice to hand out to small businesses, whether it’s about scaffolding or excavation, which seem to be the big issues on domestic projects.”
Stable relations
A more controversial change in the HSE’s enforcement approach, which will affect large and small companies in all sectors, is costs recovery – the consultation on which closed in October (see Paul Verrico and Andrew Bennett’s article on p37). Some parts of the health and safety community, including some IOSH members, have expressed concerns that the fee-for-fault proposals could adversely affect the relationship between regulator and duty-holder, and that the reputation of its inspectors within industry could even deteriorate to the level of council parking enforcement officers.3
While he understands some of the concerns, White is unequivocal in his conviction that such fears are misplaced. “We’re not going to be a slave to costs recovery. It’s not going to be our master and we’re not going to be dictated to by it,” he insists.
“But why should it affect the relationship? . . If [companies] are breaching the law, why should they feel aggrieved? We’re not going to be going out nit-picking, looking for faults. We’re not going to target to find fault to raise money. But we’ll have our programmes as they are and, if we find fault, people will be charged.”
A separate concern surrounds the potential legal implications that paying such fees might have on later prosecution proceedings – e.g. what if paying a fee for fault amounts to an acceptance of guilt? The result, say some stakeholders, could be a rise in appeals against notices, a clogging-up of the legal system, and more time wasted by inspectors on paperwork and legal matters.
White, however, thinks there are separate issues involved here, and points out that appeals against enforcement notices are rising anyhow, largely because contractors don’t want a notice against their record when they’re tendering for jobs. He says: “If there’s a concern that a notice has not been properly served, or there’s disagreement about the risk or the judgement of an inspector, you can appeal to a tribunal. That won’t change and that’s a separate issue than quibbling over the costs for the fee on the back of that notice.”
A separate appeals process regarding the fees will be set up and administered by the HSE’s back-office staff, but White does not expect this to take up too much of inspectors’ time. “An inspector might have to provide some information in relation to that appeal, but our experience of where we run costs recovery at the moment is that we do not get that many appeals.”
Engagement needs leadership
Although White does not see costs recovery as a game-changer in the relationship between regulator and duty-holder, he is more wary of the potential effect that giving extra powers to safety reps might have on the relationship between the industry and the workforce.
The idea of roving safety reps with the power to issue provisional Improvement Notices has been mooted on several occasions, but despite the cost-cutting pressures facing the HSE, it has not gained much currency over the last year. Explains White: “You can’t have worker involvement and engagement without leadership – you’ve got to have both. You’ve got to have the right environment in which to engage your workers. I don’t think taking an enforcement approach is necessarily the way to get people to change their behaviours, and that could potentially put people on the back foot.”
Similarly, White is unconvinced that extending the regulations relating to the licensing of gangmasters to cover the construction sector – another recommendation contained in the Donaghy report – would drive improvements in health and safety.
“If you take the definition of what a gangmaster is in the current legislation, nearly everyone in construction would be caught. Everyone would have to be licensed, effectively, because you’re supplying labour, or hiring labour.”
He continues: “I think the other concern is about duties owed by the employer to the employee. People forget the construction legislation – the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2007 – is drafted around the duties on those who control the work, not on the employer-employee relationship. . . I just feel we need to think carefully about whether this would be a good thing for construction. Let’s look at the hard and fast evidence.”
He does, however, suggest that the scandal uncovered in 2009 regarding the blacklisting by contractors of unionised workers who raised health and safety concerns has put the ball firmly in the court of the industry to restore trust.4
“It is very disappointing when you read and hear about that,” laments White. “It certainly has, in some areas with certain individuals, soured relationships between workers and their employers, or main contractors.”
Stressing that workers who have concerns about health and safety can contact the HSE in confidence, he urges the industry “to build bridges”, but adds that “some of the work the industry does on health and safety in particular, and some of the things it is doing to engage and involve the workforce will help towards that”.
But, if there is reduced visible presence of HSE inspectors on site – through fewer inspections – and reduced means of contact off site – epitomised by the closure of the Infoline service – won’t workers be discouraged from raising complaints?
“The Infoline does not take complaints – that’s purely about providing information, the majority of which can be found on the HSE website,” clarifies White.
“The issue about raising complaints is another limb of contacting HSE, and there will be a mechanism as we go forward. You can ring in complaints now as a worker, or you can e-mail them. . . That’s not going to change, in terms of the principle of you raising it. How we handle it is changing – so, eventually, we’re going to move to a centralised complaint-handling system.”
It’s good to talk
What effect the ‘rearrangement’ of communication channels will have on health and safety remains to be seen, but White is fully aware of the importance of communication in construction, not least when it comes to complying with the CDM Regulations 2007. The legislation has just been the subject of a major review, and White is preparing to deliver a paper on its findings, and what they mean for CDM in the future, to the HSE board in December.
The research suggests that the industry sees CDM 2007 as an improvement on the 1994 Regulations, but White says two bugbears remain – bureaucracy and coordination.
Recalling a recent visit he made with an inspector to a refurbishment site in Plymouth, he said: “A health and safety plan had been provided by a safety consultant that was completely generic. All that had been changed was the name and address of the duty-holders on the front. And I thought: this is not how it should be. First of all, we haven’t got a very intelligent client and, secondly, we haven’t got a very intelligent health and safety professional, and the two have come together in a very unhelpful way.”
Much like the mantra: ‘good health and safety is good business’, White says the coordination element to CDM makes obvious commercial sense. He explains: “In terms of getting high standards on a building site, when working as an integrated team, where the client sets the tone and nature, and people are working together, the evidence shows that that tends to deliver much better outcomes on a project – whether it’s getting the job done to time, to quality, to budget, and also in terms of high standards of health and safety.
“We want to see client leadership – they set the tone. But you have to appreciate that there are cases where there are one-off clients. Therefore, you need a well-experienced team to support the project.”
And, on the issue of bureaucracy, White replies philosophically that the HSE has done as much as it can to encourage the industry to adopt mutual recognition of pre-qualification questionnaires through the Safety Schemes in Procurement (SSIP) initiative. “We’ve said you only have to take a proportionate approach to the issue of pre-qualification,” he says. “If some clients choose to go beyond that, while we can point out to them that that’s not what CDM requires, that’s their choice – but don’t blame health and safety for that.”
Bigger issues
However, client leadership and client choice don’t always go hand in hand. Asked for his thoughts about the Bromley council official who refused to wear a hard hat while touring a gym under renovation, he raises his eyebrows when told that our story has, at the time of writing, generated an SHPonline record of 200 reader comments.5
Stressing that he didn’t know the full facts of the case, he theorises nonetheless: “Sometimes site rules can be extremely unhelpful, in terms of a blanket approach, whereas, actually, you might prefer a more proportionate, sensible approach to where hard hats need to be worn. . . He might have been quite right to say: ‘why do I need to wear it when I’m just going into this area to cut a ribbon’. Frankly, I think there are bigger things to get more concerned about.”
The Olympics is undoubtedly one of those ‘bigger things’, where, thankfully for health and safety, there have been overwhelmingly more positives than negatives. However, in terms of the impact of the fragile economy, there may, as the song goes, be trouble ahead. So, just as the supermarkets swarmed with people in early October desperate for disposable barbecue sets, the HSE will be hoping that the safety record achieved in Stratford is a sign of good times to come and not the equivalent of the wider industry’s own flash in the pan.
References
1 http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/good-health-and-safety.pdf
2 http://www.shponline.co.uk/incourt-content/full/prohibition-notice-breached-during-follow-up-inspection
3 http://www.shponline.co.uk/news-content/full/hse-consults-on-cost-recovery-from-non-compliant-businesses
4 http://www.shponline.co.uk/news-content/full/construction-firm-guilty-of-blacklisting
5 http://www.shponline.co.uk/news-content/full/council-boss-refused-to-wear-hard-hat-on-site-visit-updated
Andrew Sansom is SHP’s deputy editor
The Safety Conversation with SHP (previously the Safety and Health Podcast) aims to bring you the latest news, insights and legislation updates in the form of interviews, discussions and panel debates from leading figures within the profession.
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No tea offered on SME sites, I always got tea from Stake Holders.
You work it out?
I suspect that more of the reason for concentrating on the small to medium enterprises might well be because due to the economy there are very few major projects running at the moment, and as they stated themselves it is the smaller projects/companies that are having the fatal accidents because many only pay lip service to health and safety in my experience this has been the case.
Mr White may well bask in the ‘reflected glory’ of the Olympic Site.
Just look at the number of bankruptcies of company’s involved in the project.
It was also a project with apparent limitless money to throw at it – but the reality is, the ‘safety’ is no better than numerous other projects currently in progress.
Once the subbies can tick the safety-boxes, all will be well!!!!!!
‘Small’ projects valued at millions of pounds remain outside the pale – no ‘glory’ or lecture circuits there.
Fortunate man Bob – fortunate man!
Was it steak or stake or just shortbread biscuits?