Karen It depends on what you (and TUS) want from the committee. It is of course a legal requirement that if the TUS wants one then there should be one. One problem is frequency of meetings. If there is a meeting very month you might find that there is nothing new to talk about. We have split our meetings into a strategic meeting every three months, and more regular operational meetings dealing with the nitty gritty. A lot of the nitty gritty should be dealt with in local team meetings, so that H&S is not just a bolt on but part and parcel of the while management package. The more strategic meetings are really to review the system and make sure it works. It’s important that the right stuff is dealt with in the right meeting. Last week I was involved in a strategic departmental meeting which ended up dealing (or not dealing with) PEEPS in one building in Whitehall. As I am based in York and most of the other attendees were from other offices I couldn’t believe that this matter was being raised here. It should have been dealt with at the local level but apparently no mechanism for dealing with issue existed locally. As well as formal meetings we have regular get togethers with the TUS to discuss H&S-about once a fortnight- meetings last about 1 hour.

Karen While 'committees' are a traditional form of consultation, more radical innovative forms have been developed, especially in not-for-profit organisations, by one of the world's leading social scientists active in consultative planning and evaluation. Bill Trochim, of Cornell University, invented the method of concept mapping to introduce statistical analysis and graphical feedback into consultation with forum groups and other kinds of user representation. He and his wife, Anna Kane, published a guide to this method, Concept Mapping, published by Sage, 2007, which has been acclaimed by users. While this approach may be well beyond conventional styles of safety management, it's far, far more cost-effective than anything published in the sphere of safety management. The methods of statistical analysis (multi-dimensional scaling and cluster analysis) are no more demanding than those used in the more rigorous approaches to behavioural safety. It has the great advantage of being consistent in sticking with the language and concepts of workers and managers so they receive congruent feedback necessary for decision-making and error-management.

Ours is about an hour too and that's for a national organisation. If the management teams are performing, it should'nt need to be any longer than that.