A leading industry consultant has urged operators of Control of Major Accident Hazard (COMAH) sites to ensure safety procedures are watertight after the HSE shifted the focus of its inspections to test competency.
ABB Consulting has warned that the HSE’s new ‘bottom-up’ approach, which examines the way an organisation’s most hazardous processes are completed on a day-to-day basis, will focus on the individual competence relative to safety and an organisation’s safety culture rather than just the systems in place.
Dave Dyer, senior consultant at ABB Consulting, has warned top tier and lower-tier COMAH site operators that a failure to demonstrate competency will lead to a full and time-consuming HSE safety audit being carried out.
“We now have a recognition from the HSE that, often, when things do go wrong, people are somewhere behind it. Human error is by far the most frequent cause of loss-of-containment events,” he said.
“Competency testing was previously only ‘implicit’ as part of HSE checks, but there is a far greater focus on it now. The aim is to improve safety, not to catch companies out, but I fear many could be under-prepared for this new attitude.”
Dyer said that initial research had shown that many companies had yet to have a competency inspection. His message was to “be prepared” because they were on their way.
ABB’s senior consultant added that the HSE would be looking at two safety-critical tasks at a company — such as tanker loading/unloading — and would deal directly with the people responsible for the task.
The individuals, he added, would be asked to provide guidance notes, safety operating procedures and checklists, and would then be observed completing the task.
“This represents a new way of looking at safety for the HSE and there is a chance it could catch companies off-guard,” Dyer said. “That’s not the aim — the aim is to improve procedures and create safer working environments.”
A spokesperson for the HSE told SHP: “A key element of the HSE’s intervention programme at onshore major hazard COMAH sites is to look at how companies manage competence in relation to major hazard risks.
“The HSE has a three-year targeted strategic programme at top-tier COMAH sites to initially look at the competence of staff involved in safety-related tasks that directly impact on the control of major hazard risks. Should those initial checks reveal an underlying concern about the organisation’s competence management system, then the HSE may decide to look in greater detail at the company’s arrangements. This would determine whether there is an underlying weakness in those arrangements.”
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
