How do health and safety measures compare on construction sites like Crossrail and nature reserves? How does the role of a health and safety manager change in concert halls and museums?
To find out, Protecting London is investigating landmarks across the capital and showing how they operate on a day-to-day basis.
For Episode 3 of Protecting London we go deep underground to meet Steve Hails, health and safety director for Crossrail.
Steve begins by outlining the scale and complexity of the project, which highlights how vast his challenges are.
“We’re building 42km of tunnels under the existing infrastructure, under the streets of London. Ten new stations, many of which are new underground stations. We’re excavating 8 million tonnes of earth [which is enough to fill Wembley Stadium four times], all of which needs to be removed from one of the world’s busiest cities.”
Carrying this job out is a diverse workforce of 13,000 people who come together in heart of the city, in rather cramped conditions.
The end goal they’re all working towards is December 2018 – the date stations are due to open. When that happens, the capacity of London’s rail network will increase by 10 per cent capacity and journey times across the city will be drastically reduced.
“A fantastic addition to London, estimated to add £42 billion pounds’ worth of value to the UK economy and London and the South East, something that is very much needed for the UK. It’s a fantastic undertaking.”
Steel rings removed from the ceiling of Connaught Tunnel. John Zammit
Crossrail is clearly a CDM job on its largest scale and representatives of the project were involved in the consultation. Now the legislation is in place, Steve tells us what it means for them.
“The new role of the principal designer instead of the CDM-C doesn’t make a great deal of difference to Crossrail because when you look at our processes and procedures we are already satisfying the expectations of the new regulations.”
As they were already meeting many of the CDM requirements before the regulation took effect, the job has mainly been informing everyone of any new responsibilities.
The highly ambitious project regards health and safety as its core principle, its number one value. And their philosophy, Steve tells us, is ‘Target Zero’ – a belief that everyone has the right to go
home unharmed, that all harm is preventable, and that everyone has to work together for this to be achieved.
Attaining Target Zero requires close relationships between all Crossrail staff and contractors, as well as absolute cooperation between the various disciplines, from design through to build and hand-over to the operating railway.
“Collaboration is vitally important to make sure that we have success… If we don’t work together we will fail.”
Tunnel boring machine Victoria breaks through into Canary Wharf Station. Tom Lawson
To engage the workforce in Target Zero, each April and October ‘Stepping Up Week’ takes place. During those weeks every site delivers its own programme of health and safety activities (which don’t detract from work) and they’ve been incredibly successful – “It’s almost become part of the language at Crossrail,” Steve says.
Another effective health and safety initiative at Crossrail is HSPI; the Health & Safety Performance Index. It was introduced as a mechanism for reporting health and safety, measured by effort/input and effectiveness of activities.
“It focuses on what we call the leading indicators, so the proactive elements that can influence strong health and safety performance and generate world-class performance.”
HSPI enables contractors to see exactly how well they’re performing and assess where they can improve. It’s led to friendly competition amongst workers, who strive for best performance scores.
There’s been a 65 per cent improvement in scores over the past two years, Steve tells us, and the wider infrastructure industry has also taken interest; HSPI could form the base of a common industry standard.
Despite Crossrail’s world-leading health and safety measures, one member of the team, Rene Tkacik, sadly lost his life in a work-related accident on 7 March 2014.
“It was a tragic time for everyone involved in Crossrail. Our thoughts are still with Rene’s friends, family and colleagues”, Steve says.
Collectively it was decided that the loss of Rene would give them even greater resolve to achieve Target Zero, as opposed to detracting from what they were trying to achieve.
“Everything we do going forward, is in memory of Rene.”
Architects impression of oversite development at Canary Wharf Crossrail Station. Canary Wharf Group
Having benefited from the experiences of past infrastructure projects, Crossrail is committed to set the tone of future infrastructure projects and leave behind a legacy of world-class health and safety.
“We took an awful lot of best practice that came from London 2012, and that became our baseline, our benchmark, and then we built on that. So we said we are going to raise the bar, and it’s a condition of the contract.”
The Crossrail team have already started working with HS2 and the Thames Tideway tunnel, sharing what’s worked, what hasn’t worked well and what they’d do differently if they had their time again.
“This is a fantastic infrastructure project, it’s Europe’s largest, and as a result you can see on a day-to-day basis how individuals want to make this the safest job. The things they’re coming up with, the innovations are vitally important for us now and will be shared for generations to come, for our legacy.”
For more on our Protecting London series, download our exclusive report on London’s most iconic landmarks, and watch episode one Protecting London: British Museum and episode two, Protecting London: The Royal Albert Hall.
This would be a great target Zero-Harm video if there weren’t two obvious PPE non-conformances which don’t align with the Target-Zero philosophy… i.e. Steve’s (and others) disregard for the chinstrap which is attached to the helmets but placed over the front/back and near the end of the video the loud construction noises which can be heard over Steve (and where it becomes difficult to hear him over the banging in the background) where he is not wearing any hearing protection.
That said well-done on ensuring compliance with the changing CDM Requirements in advance of their release.
Really good example of health and safety at work, acknowledging issues as and when they occur and working in partnership with others to reach a successful conclusion. Well done to all and fingers crossed it all stays on track