Personal injury advice from
Thompsons Solicitors
Health and Safety Issues in the Construction Industry
9th November 2007
At The Legal Line, one of our main aims is to promote health and safety in the workplace. It is important that employees and visitors to workplaces are protected from harm where possible in every industry, none more so than the construction industry.
Sadly, building site accidents are all too common, many resulting in serious injuries or even fatalities. Our specialist personal injury lawyers, Thompsons Solicitors, have a keen interest in resolving this and are campaigning to highlight the issue.
Health and Safety Crisis
In the following article for the Insurance Times, one of our lawyers commented on the situation and expressed the opinion that roving safety representatives could form part of the solution:
“It was good to hear the recent construction forum convened by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which I attended as an observer, employers and employer representatives stating their commitment to health and safety. But their comment that there is “no one single solution” was a cliché, too often used as an excuse to avoid any specific commitments.
The scale of the health and safety crisis in the construction industry was disturbingly put in context by one trade union general secretary. He pointed out that it would have been safer to be a British soldier in Iraq where, since the war began, approximately 170 of them have been killed, than in the UK construction industry, where more than 300 workers have been killed in the same period.
The Construction Skills Certificate scheme is a positive development. One million people have been registered on it so far. It requires minimum standards and, if enforced across all sites, will be a way forward.
But enforcement needs not only resources, but regulation to end the rogue practices within the grey economy, where lip service is paid to health and safety but few questions are asked about training and qualifications. Every year there are some 50,000 applications for the 7,000 apprenticeships on offer in the construction industry. Surely in boom times we should be seeing more apprenticeships when there is clearly a demand? And yet all too often the successful apprentices give up their places as soon as they think they’ve acquired enough skills to make something approaching a living.
As vital and as welcome – and I got the opinion as genuine – as the DWP’s initiative is, only significant funds and effective use of them will have an impact. Giving out leaflets at builders’ yards, as one delegate suggested at the forum, is not what the trade unions and safety campaigners have in mind.
A Health and Safety Executive (HSE) representative at the forum got me thinking when he said that he would never have enough resources to police sites in the “old fashioned way”. He called for more creativity in enforcing health and safety.
Roving safety reps, jointly sponsored by government, industry and unions, would certainly be a creative response and a more effective use of resources than inspections, which employers know happen so rarely – once every 12 years is the most commonly quoted statistic – that they effectively ignore them.
Roving reps are incredibly valuable in targeting small and medium sized firms – the sites where accidents most frequently happen – and helping to change the health and safety culture within them. Employers (and insurers) with good health and safety have nothing to fear from their presence.
Roving reps, with their trade union backgrounds, know that the key issue is not the exposure of the bad for the sake of it, but working with employers to raise standards. It was disappointing that the HSE’s recent worker involvement consultation did not produce new rights for safety reps – including the right to call an immediate halt to dangerous working practices. If this new-found DWP energy is to mean anything, it must address this omission.
There may be no single solution to health and safety issues in the construction industry, but roving safety reps, with specific rights, proper resources and appropriate recognition should surely form part of the answer.”
Our Specialist Workplace Accident Solicitors
Our lawyers have extensive experience in recovering compensation for the victims of accidents at work, including accidents on construction sites. We also specialise in all other areas of personal injury and industrial disease, so can offer expert claim advice on a cost free basis.
If you or a member of your family has been injured, and you feel that someone else is to blame, you may be entitled to claim compensation. Contact us on 0800 0328511, or by completing an online claim enquiry form.
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