Company prosecution after fall from roof

From the Health and Safety Executive press office: 

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is warning companies whose business involves working at height to ensure they provide suitable safety equipment and have appropriate procedures in place before allowing their staff to work in potentially dangerous situations.

It follows the prosecution of a North Wales roofing contractor in relation to an incident where one of his employees sustained serious injuries, and later died, after a 25ft fall through a skylight on the roof of the Comet store in Wrexham.

Paul Christopher Alker, 33, required surgery for a broken collar bone after the fall, just days after starting work with Wrexham Roof Services Ltd. He died shortly after his operation.

In a prosecution brought by the Crown Prosecution Service, Steven Christopher Smith, director of Wrexham Roof Services Ltd, Rhostyllen, Wrexham, pleaded guilty to manslaughter, a charge under the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 and a further charge of committing acts intending to pervert the course of justice. Smith was jailed for a total of two and a half years following a hearing at Mold Crown Court.

HSE assisted North Wales Police on the investigation into the incident, and HSE inspector Debbie John said it was not acceptable for employers to cut corners.

“Mr Smith clearly knew that he should have provided safety harnesses for people working on roofs, but chose only to do this after the incident which led to the death of Mr Alker.

“Figures show that in 2006/07, 45 people have died and more than 3000 suffered a serious injury after a fall from height in the workplace. It remains the most common cause of fatal injury in the workplace, but the risk does not just apply to those working at great height. Many fatal and serious injuries are caused by people falling from below head height too.

“Health and Safety rules are not there to inconvenience employers or to wrap employees or others in cotton wool – they are in place to ensure incidents like this are prevented, and the risk of this incident happening would have been significantly reduced had appropriate safety equipment been provided.”

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Warehousing and storage: new guide from the HSE

The HSE has published a new, free advice guide to health and safety in warehousing and storage. The pamphlet tackles all the most common causes of accidents, such as slips and trips, falls from height, manual handling and injuries linked to vehicles.  The Adobe PDF pamphlet can be downloaded here:

http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg412.pdf

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Self-reported work-related illness and workplace injuries

Headline results from the latest survey of self-reported work-related illness and workplace injury to gain a national view based on individuals’ perceptions.  Here:

http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/publications/swi.htm?ebul=hsegen/16-jul-2007&cr=8

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New HSE text call back enquiry service

Why not try HSE’s new call back service. Just fill out the form below or simply text the keyword ‘HSE’ to 64446† and they’ll call you back within 1 hour. If you can’t come to the phone when they call back, don’t worry as their operators will try three times to call you. This service is available Monday to Friday between 9am to 5pm.

HSE’s Online ‘Request a call back’:  HERE

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Safety representatives effective in promoting Health and safety messages

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in partnership with Unite published a research report that evaluates the effectiveness of involving safety representatives in delivering health and safety initiatives in the workplace.

http://www.amicustheunion.org/default.aspx?page=7086

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HandS November update

HandS has been updated today with the addition of a new section on PPE.  The issues covered on this new page are those that some of you may have encountered: no PPE being provided; PPE being provided, but as a substitute for proper controls on hazards; being charged by your employer for PPE; having to share PPE with other people; the imposition of mandatory blanket PPE; and the problem of employees who won’t use their PPE.

Mandatory Blanket PPE is a policy concept that is spreading, causing quite a few problems on job sites, and a fair amount of controversy amongst health and safety professionals. This is where your employer issues everyone with a bundle of PPE and makes it obligatory to wear it all the time, wherever you are in the workplace or on a site. One view credits such employers with being conscientiously pro-active. Another view is that it amounts to little more than lazy health and safety management, because PPE is being distributed and used as the first resort (rather than the last), instead of spending the necessary time and money to carry out proper risk assessments and establish good risk controls, as required by the law.

It’s one thing to be forced to wear PPE that is uncomfortable, makes a job more difficult, or introduces new hazards.  It is quite another for someone to flaunt their total disregard for their own safety and that of people around them. The problem of employees who won’t wear PPE is one that affects Safety Reps as well.  While it is never up to you as a Safety Rep to act as a policeman for management, you may find yourself in the awkward position of having to encourage co-operation with company policy.

PPE is our right, a right that other working people fought to get for us, and one that a lot of people throughout the world wish they had.  In the United States, in 1999, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) finally proposed a rule requiring employers to pay for protective clothing, face shields, gloves and other equipment used by U.S. workers. But before the proposal became a standard, Mr. Bush was elected to office. Since then, the U.S. Department of Labor has neglected to enact the standard. Many workers in America’s most dangerous industries, including meatpacking, poultry, and construction, who have high rates of injury, are still forced by their employers to pay for their own safety gear. According to OSHA’s own figures, 400,000 workers have been injured and 50 have died owing to the lack of the PPE rule. Since only 14% of U.S. workers even belong to a union, we can imagine they’ll be waiting quite a while for PPE that they don’t have to pay for themselves.  (The grass is not always greener on the other side.)

The new PPE page encourages employees to take advantage of that right, and to make good use of PPE, with a lesson ’sorely’ learned (with photographs) by a personal friend and fellow Safety Rep, who now wishes he’d donned a pair of gloves to do some simple engine maintenance on his car at home.

I hope some of you find the page useful.  As always, stories, comments, suggestions and contributions for the site are always welcomed.

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£237,000 pay out to injured electrician

An electrician whose hand became crushed in a machine while working at Heathrow airport has won £237,000 in the wake of a Unite-backed legal claim.
 
Unite member Eric Palmer, from Mold in Clwyd suffered agonising injuries and shock in August 2004 when his hand got caught in a machine which separates concrete and water from sand and aggregate mix.
 
He had warned his line manager that he wasn’t trained for the repair job but his pleas went unheeded.
 
The injuries have never properly healed despite extensive medical treatment and surgery and still give him nightmares.
 
He said: “I suffered physical and mental injuries as a result of the accident. Even the simple things which previously I would have taken in my stride, like building a pond in the garden which has stood unfinished for three years, are difficult, if not impossible. Even now I find it difficult to sleep and have nightmares about the machine and what happened.”
 
Solicitor Ken Jones said Eric Palmer’s employer – construction company Laing O’Rourke – had failed on several counts. He was clearly put in a position of danger and was given no guidance whatsoever as to how to handle the machine. Eric himself recognised that attending to the machine wasn’t the right thing to do. Unfortunately he paid a very high price for agreeing to do it.”
– from the Unite @ctivist Newsletter

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Changes to Industrial Diseases Disablement Benefit for Hand Arm Vibration Syndrome

The Social Security (Industrial Injuries) (Prescribed Diseases) Amendment (No.2) Regulations 2007 mean that, from 1 October 2007, people who have sensorineural symptoms of the severity described in the regulations arising from working with the prescribed tools will now be covered by the terms of the prescription, whether or not they have the prescribed vascular symptoms.

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HSE Prosecutions Database

After a lapse of almost a year, HSE is again posting prosecutions. They have begun inputting cases with hearing dates after November 1, 2006, and say they will update new cases weekly as they are reported. “In view of the volume of prosecutions now posted, we are not inputting previous cases. There will therefore be a gap in our database from a hearing date of 24 January 2006 until November 1st. Anyone not finding a case which may have been heard between January and November 2006, should therefore try searching the HSE Prosecutions database.”

Since relaunching the Prosecution database in January 2007, after a break of around a year, the HSE appears to have changed the format of the case numbers. So, for entries with a hearing date before the 24 January 2006, you should search the database with the defendants name, instead of a case number that you may have, if you desire to check details for yourself.

News From HASTAM, at http://www.hastam.co.uk/hsnews/

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Health and safety issues in flooded areas

Health and safety issues in flooded areas - Advice to safety representatives… The TUC has produced a briefing for safety representatives and union members, giving advice on what to do in those parts of the country that are flooded to ensure the health and safety of employees.

http://www.tuc.org.uk/h_and_s/tuc-13550-f0.cfm

Visit the address above to view the documents in full, in print format or in text-only format.

Advice from the Health Protection Agency:

http://www.hpa.org.uk/flooding/default.htm

Flood heath advice from NHS Direct:

http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/articles/article.aspx?articleId=2284

Environment Agency advice on flooding:

http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/subjects/flood/

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