We had an incident where by an employee fell from the vehicle gantry whilst sheeting over his load using the sheet winding handle from the vehicle gantry. Policy now is zero tolerance, all employees sheeting is done from ground level by using an extension winding handle to prevent working at height. The question is we also have farmers and contract hauliers deliver and collect to site and not all have the facility to sheet from the floor therefore they still work from height. My question is this, we have wrote and advised these farmers and hauliers of our policy and advised them of the good practice to do the same, if we were faced with an incident fall from height from one of these would we be held responsible for failing to control the contractor with our safe practices whilst they were on our premises.

If you have a lot of vehicle sheeting on your premises them perhaps you should be providing an adequate access gantry. Perhaps not realistic to ask all famers and contractors to have remote sheeting systems in place but it depends what type of vehicles you are talking about. Tipper lorries usually have remote systems and could probabyl be retrofitted but this isn't so easy when you are looking at flatbeds. As to fault - each case would be taken on merit. I refer you to my first point, If you have regular sheeting operations carried out by external drivers (you have no control over their type of sheeting systems) then I might exepect you to have provided adequate access facilities.

Not a fan of harnesses and fall restraints in loading and unloading and neither are the drivers.

Having worked in both the waste and quarrying industries where sheeting problems were common and one in which the HSE paid a great deal of interest I’m afraid that the answer to your question is, I believe, ‘yes – you will be held responsible’. I think the regulator would take the view that just writing to them isn’t enough – if they’re unsafe to be loaded you shouldn’t load them! An HSE inspector told me as much himself. I’m also afraid that there is no easy magic bullet solution. I assume you’re getting vehicles/trailers of differing shapes & sizes - it’s very difficult to get a sheeting gantry to meet these differing shapes (lots of quarries are still littered with old rusting, unloved gantries – or at least they were until the prices of scrap went up). Some waste sites put in harness systems so that any unsheeting had to take place when the person was harnessed up. The problem of course is that not many lorry drivers are trained in harness use and no emergency recovery systems were in place – so the waste companies had to keep the station permanently manned. The HSE used to provide guidance on sheeting/unsheeting – but I think this was withdrawn & never reissued. The problem in these industries has largely gone away as it is very rare for newer tippers not to be provided with ground operated sheeting systems – there are now very few ‘collects’ from independents running older tippers. You could perhaps look at minimising the risk of a fall & provide crash mats or air bags – but I would guess the regulator would say that you’re not following the working at height regs and preventing the work at height in the first instance. I would think they would take the view that there are enough devices on the market to operate from ground level to negate the risk at source. Apologies if this is a bit of a depressing read but we lived with this problem for years and it was never resolved properly until the ground level sheeting systems came in.

You can't take as red what one inspector says. They will take each case in it's own right. You are referring to the waste and quarrying industries, which are high risk industries where the use of tipper lorries and skips is commonplace and therefore remote sheeting systems are reasonably practicable. However, when you start talking about other industries, other types of vehicles and farming it can be different.There is no outright ban on accessing the back of vehicles to sort out loads. Farmers would be well and truely stuffed if that was the case. Like I said each case on it's own merit. In these sort of circumstances it is about co-operation. Both parties have duties. You can't just say refuse to unload and load someone if they don't have remote sheeting systems. Not unless the compoany wants to go out of business. A more viable solution needs to be found don't you think. I would still like to know more about the types of lorries involved (ie, tipper, flatbed etc) so that proper advice can be given here.