My views on 'paper safety' has been aired on these forums on may occasions. There is far too much documentation and much of it adds little value to health and safety - the general excuse is it is for the ' audit trail'. I feel sorry for those at the coal face who are obliged to fill end endless documents to prove they are doing their job properly, working on the tools some can barely read or write. I wonder when someone will realise that a piece of paper with signatures on only proves that 'someone' has signed a piece of paper! I recall a situation some while back with a couple of electrical guys fitting comms where I asked to see their method statement. This chap reached into his van and produced a 70 page method statement neatly bound and insulated in a plastic folder. I asked if he had read the MS - he said "nope, would you?" I said "no, crack on".

Whilst I whole-heartedly agree with all your points, the cold reality is that should an incident / accident occur the courts (be it criminal or civil) really are only interested in documentation.. Clearly excessive documentation is counter productive (and our corporate policy is to produce the minimal amount of paperwork to satisfy our requirements and use lay terms etc. etc.) however for some tasks more is more.. Speaking with our primary authority they recount times in court with other similar buisiness where they had lost a court case due to a lack of documentation to demonstrate they did what they did! (i.e. in practice the checks were being made but a decision was made (in good intentions) to not document everything due to the practicialities of filling in forms and filing compelted forms). I suppose it goes back to they why are we employed, to protect the employees, the company or both!

At my last company we had a least 12 different method statements for our range of clients (mostly UKCG companies) these ranged from half a dozen pages up to approximately 25 pages all for the same task! Each company would issue a different guidance document for method statements which basically ranged from a 6 point plan right up to a 17 point plan and if you did not format the method statement following the respective plan it would be rejected out of hand. Surely these companies could get their heads together and come up with a common method statement format therfore reducing the amount of paperwork required - or is this too much to ask for?

Does it serve a useful purpose? (Does it ensure we meet legal obligations? Does it help ensure the health and safety of our workforce, and others?) Does it achieve this? Is the effort/cost commensurate with the benefits? If answer is 'yes', can it be simplified? If answe is 'no' then don't do it.

The amount of paperwork should be proportionate to the sort of work being carried out. Our organisation employs 900 ish people and unlike some places, we are not doing just one job but hundreds of different tasks for many clients (basically R&D covering everything from labs to fieldwork). Therefore the paperwork is ‘owned’ by the people who do the work: they create the Sops and risk assessments and they ensure that training records are kept upto date. Apart from that we don’t need anything else really. We’ve had the HSE on site and they have looked at this paperwork and have been happy it it. As far as civil claims are concerned there is never enough paperwork to keep the lawyers off your back so we don’t bother. They once asked for risk assessment for carrying a cup of tea down the corridor! I like to keep paperwork to a minimum, I tell staff I expect something to be written down, but I don’t expect pages and pages of stuff for its own sake. As far as COSHH is concerned I don’t expect a document for every substance used- we use thousands, just for the process we do, of which there are dozens. I have recently had a clash with our QA team who have informed me that for the sake of document control all risk assessments should use the same format- it makes them easier to audit. This would mean telling people to scrap all of the documents they are using and replace them with documents which look ‘nice’ but might actually be useless. I have dug in my heels and told them to get lost!

quote=terry556]Paperwork is all part of the job these days with audits, papertrails,etc. If an employee went to a solicitor no win no fee, at least you can prove that you have done everything, reasonably practicable to reduce the risks etc in the workplace,

And returning back to the real world from cloud cukoo land..... Yes of course paperwork is a pain in the backside and of course some companies go OTT and have reams of unnecessary paperwork and minimal documentation really is best....I don't think any of us dispute that do we????.........BUT this is the real world and like it lump it paperwork is needed as a back up when a certain substance hits the fan. Do it, document it - or you really can't prove it in court. That's reality

There is never enough paper when you are in court or similar situation but there is always to much paper in day to day situations My advice is that all 'management' type paperwork should be such that it is suitable and sufficient for a court case but day to day paperwork should be suitable for the people directly involved - I have cut down many pages to just one page for day to day staff on many an occasion Its interesting to note that when it suites management they will produce reams of paper on spurious, political, self praise etc. points but its always to much effort when it involves helping the workforce

quote=Clairel]And returning back to the real world from cloud cukoo land..... Yes of course paperwork is a pain in the backside and of course some companies go OTT and have reams of unnecessary paperwork and minimal documentation really is best....I don't think any of us dispute that do we????.........BUT this is the real world and like it lump it paperwork is needed as a back up when a certain substance hits the fan. Do it, document it - or you really can't prove it in court. That's reality

Most companies do not take the time to think what paperwork they actually need. The suggestion that the paperwork is required by HSE or in the event of a claim is simply an excuse because no one wants to make a decision to not create another piece of paper, even if they think it is a waste of time or counter-productive. Procedures is one area I do a lot of work in. Most companies try to write one for every task and have decided that all procedures should look the same. This makes no sense to me because we end up with loads of procedures that are used very rarely. I work with companies to identify the tasks they perform. We then use a method of ranking them according to the benefit of having a procedure. We invariably find that there are lots of procedures that have little or no value yet there are some tasks where a procedure would be very valuable but one has not been developed. My view is that companies start by writing the easy procedures, they keep going until it gets too difficult and then they stop. It would be much better if they accepted that a procedure cannot be written for every task, but aimed to cover all the tasks where a procedure is of greatest value. Using a method to prioritise means you have a defence if someone wants to know why a procedure was not written.

I'm not sure I go with all this holier than thou sentiment that we're not in the job of protecting the employer in the event of a court case. Of course the primary job we have is to prevent accidents BUT we also have to make ensure that employers (and workers) comply with the law. In some cases that requires paperwork and in others it requires the ability to prove that compliance has taken place through paperwork. Let's not get all snotty nosed about protecting employers and workers in a court case, like somehow it's beneath our moral compass.

But not all paperwork is for workers though. Records of training, maintenance and other checks are also part of the paperwork system. Those are there as nothing more than proof really. I actually don't agree with giving employees risk assessments at all. I think employees should be talked through what the risks are to them and what they need to do. Most RA's are too long and too complicated and also usually include what still needs to be done. IMO a RA is there as a tool to check everything is being done that could / should be done and to provide a legal document should the need arise. The employee just wants to know what to do and why at the end of the day but that level of detail is not enough to satisfty the courts that enough has been done.

You don't need two pages to hammer in a nail. Alternatively, a single page isn't going to be adequate to lift in a dozen beams, over a railway at night. It's all relative to the task / operation, commercial / statutory / stakeholder expectations etc.

"Just because an accident occurs that doesn't necessarily mean that the RA wasn't good enough." Claire, I would prefer to agree with you but we had a recent injury on site where someone fell on uneven ground( no worse than Judith's hopscotch rink) and our inspector said the fact that he suffered significant injury - cracked rib- meant that we had a significant risk so it should have been assessed. Ken