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Stegalloway123  
#1 Posted : 18 February 2021 16:19:10(UTC)
Rank: Forum user
Stegalloway123

Hi. 

I work on the railway were a group of us travel to numerous outstations to clean stabled units there. We have to follow numerous safety procedures as identified by risk assessments or determind by industry standards.

What my question is, which im asking out of curiosity for now is: Should we have supervision to check these procedures are beng followed ?  maybe not constant but periodically ?  What does HS Law and regs say about supervision, any help appreciated

A Kurdziel  
#2 Posted : 18 February 2021 16:36:01(UTC)
Rank: Super forum user
A Kurdziel

The thing with supervision is that it needs to be tailored to the workers. Essentially can you trust them to work on their own or do they  require more supervision?

I have no idea how you measure that but if one of them does have an accident it will be upto you to prove that they had enough supervision. Like you say, they  might need someone to check them every so often but what can you do most of the time?

HSSnail  
#3 Posted : 19 February 2021 08:29:32(UTC)
Rank: Super forum user
HSSnail

This is covered by Regulation 5 of the Health and Safety management regulations 1999 which states

5.—(1) Every employer shall make and give effect to such arrangements as are appropriate, having regard to the nature of his activities and the size of his undertaking, for the effective planning, organisation, control, monitoring and review of the preventive and protective measures.

Sorry I hate quoting regulations. There used to be an ACOP that went with these which gave more detail – but the HSE had to withdraw it as they were accused by the government of gold plating guidance into legislation.

So as A Kurdziel says it’s not a one size fits all – and if anything happened it’s up to the employer to show they had adequate arrangements in place.

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