What is brown and yellow and requires a traffic management plan that would put the biggest and busiest construction site in the shade?
If I say Glastonbury, 175,000 crusty rock-and-roll fans, and temporary toilets, you get the picture! According to Tim Roberts, head of health and safety for the annual music extravaganza held in Somerset every June, traffic management and segregation is the biggest single health and safety issue on the 1100-acre site.
But it is by no means the only challenge. As Tim pointed out, Worthy Farm in Pilton is turned into a temporary city for the festival, incorporating dozens of stages, all set up by hundreds of contractors and a workforce of around 25,000 in the eight-week period leading up to the event. He knows it has all been a success, he said, is “if people can park, pay and pee” without harm or hassle!
Tim has been overseeing the vast health and safety operation unleashed by Glastonbury for 10 years now and he has realised there is a big difference between perception of the event, and the reality. He explained: “The perception is that the festival is an unregulated environment. Hedonism and ‘anything goes’ is the received wisdom. It’s all about debauchery, excess and mud, people think.
“But the reality is that this is a highly-organised operation that has evolved over 40 years. We build, feed and entertain a city that has no permanent infrastructure. This is a working farm the rest of the year!”
How Tim and his team of 14-18 health and safety officers do this is by having constructive and dynamic partnerships with the local police, emergency services, and enforcing authorities. It is a joint enterprise, he said, “in which we transfer skills, so the local authorities develop world-recognised competence in events management”.
This cumulative effort has obviously paid off. During the 2009 festival, during 16 million hours on site (counting the workforce of 25,000 and 175,000 attendees), there were just four reportable injuries – only one of them classifiable as an over-three-day incident.
The Glastonbury health and safety team follows a five-step risk assessment process, based on the HSE approach. Over-winter policy and planning is carried out first, followed by document collection and collation, which is done early to avoid fire-fighting later on. During the build phase, managing construction operations is the key focus – especially, as Tim pointed out, when you have such issues to deal with as a high-pressure gas pipe that serves the whole of the west of England running directly under the site, and nobody knows exactly how deep down it is buried!
During the event itself, overseeing the public operation is the priority and, after the last band has packed up its instruments and left the stage, the whole operation is reviewed, which subsequently feeds back into the initial policy and planning step for the following year.
Tim was full of praise for the non-prescriptive legislative approach in the UK and the flexibility it allows him in his work. He said: “I find myself daily giving definitions of reasonable practicability. Basically, our raison-d’etre is to make craziness happen safely and reliably. Our role is an enabling one, not a prohibiting one and God bless the good old Health and Safety at Work Act for providing us with that framework.”
In terms of resources, in addition to his team of health and safety officers Tim has at his disposal specialist teams looking after fire, structural, transport and noise issues. However, what he relies on most is the existence of a flourishing safety culture on the site.
He explained: “We all have a common purpose – from the licensee down to the volunteer stewards – as well as a common commitment and passion to getting things right. Shot through that whole process is empathy with the public. We aim to constantly emphasise the positive aspects of safety – self-protection and benevolent self-interest to do the right thing for yourself and others around you.”
All staff on the site now receive formal training and induction, and Tim and his team are now rolling out the new safety passport for the live events sector. The workforce has multiple opportunities to provide feedback, he said, while the people at the top of the organisation are constantly onsite, making sure they understand what is going on at the coalface. “Otherwise,” he pointed out, “you just become remote, and policy becomes lip service.”
Summing up the main challenges in addition to traffic management and, er, liquid transport Tim listed them as follows: fire safety – “a very significant issue, particularly given the combination of gas cylinders and tents”; structural safety – “while some of the structures on site are built out of yak’s wool and spit others involve significant steelwork”. Here, weather susceptibility is also a big concern. Mud causes obvious problems, but wind is also an issue, and even good weather can bring its own difficulties, in the form of too-dry soil and dust; and noise – “unlike most businesses, ours is about making noise not eliminating it!”
All of these issues are addressed by following the principles of HSG65 and implementing the hierarchy of controls – “same as any other industry”, said Tim. Focusing on traffic management, he explained the controls used at Glastonbury, which include strict vehicle-access rules, pedestrian and vehicle chaperone zones, close management of vehicle movement times, and 24-hour management of crossing points.
The net result has been a huge reduction in indicents, consistently safe and happy customers, healthy and safe workers, greatly decreased insurance costs, and, ultimately, a festival that is famous around the world for its longevity and reliability.
Tim left the delegates with a number of useful lessons that can be applied by practitioners in any workplace:
- Scale is not an impediment to change;
- Getting people on side is crucial – safety is about participation, not PPE;
- Make incremental changes – look beyond the horizon for long-term return-on-investment;
- Prioritise your efforts – don’t get lost in all the ‘window-dressing’ stuff; and
- Never be afraid to empower your workforce.
To read a previous SHP article about Tim Roberts and his festival work, click here.
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