Posted By Thomas Woods
Please visit the National Britannia website.

If we all visit the site it will save Kevin the trouble of having to place an ad on every thread.

Posted By peter gotch
The said Kevin comments “With most of our consultants being ex-enforcement officers (ex EHOs or ex HSE inspectorate)anything an enforcement officer would focus on we would also focus on(as our consultants have been given the same training and have the same experience and so on)thus making sure nothing is missed.”

Interesting concept except that enforcement officers are by no means consistent for a variety of reasons and with the overall level of competence within HSE and LAs on a steady decline.

The other problem of course is that if a H&S consultancy employ clones they restrict new thinking.

Even an ex HSE Inspector with 25 years experience in a broad range of sectors can find that someone from a different background can make them revisit their prioritisation of risks.

Having personally investigated 7 roofers’ fatalities, I was naturally concerned about work on a flat roof with no edge protection when I visited a large construction site with a colleague who had recently attained an ergonomics degree. She was more concerned about the risks arising from physically throwing roughcast onto the walls. With the benefit of hindsight the overall level of risks arising from manual handling and upper limb disorder risks probably exceeded the risks from falls, albeit if the worst case potential injury was less.

Paul, you will find that different LAs have differing approaches, not all using checklists. We were sent one by one LA which effectively went through the Offices, Shops and Railway Premises Act 1963, Section by Section, so for example going into detail about redecoration and wall cleaning requirements, and completely omitted consideration of “new” risks eg COSHH, display screen equipment, stress etc.

Regards, Peter

Posted By Thomas Woods
Peter,

You’re absolutely right about enforcing officers and consistency. Two LA officers paid separate visits to an office risk I deal with. The first (an old hand) found no real problems. The second (straight out of Uni) made the company put up a screen on one side the slightly raised (3”) tea making area. This was to reduce the chance of them tripping. I assume the logic was if the area can only be approached from one side instead of two it would halve the likelihood of trip? Since the introduction of the screen two people have scalded themselves by catching the cup on it as they turned round in the much reduced space.

I tell my clients to leave something obvious but not dangerous for the LA officers to find as they don’t like to go away empty handed, so to speak.

On the other hand if there wasn’t some level of subjectivity shown by H&S and fire enforcement officers most of the traditional industries left in this part of the world would have been closed down.