BiPartition

Friday, March 12th, 2010

HSE Launches Construction Site Inspections for the Third Year in a Row

The HSE will be cracking down on construction sites across Great Britain that put their workers at risk. This initiative started as a result of the HSE’s desire to put a stop to the death toll in construction related accidents across the UK.

There is no doubt that the construction industry in the UK is one of the most dangerous industries and that most of the deaths and injuries happened due to a lax attitude towards safety precautions. In the year 2008-09 53 deaths were reported and approximately 12,000 injuries were reported from the construction industry.

Activities relating to refurbishment and roofing are under the scanner as quite a few of the deaths that are reported are from this sector. In order to conduct the inspection the inspectors will arrive unannounced at construction sites.

Philip White, the chief inspector of constructions at the HSE has said that the HSE is working to reduce the number of deaths in the construction industry by cracking down on those that who are careless towards safety procedures. He believes that certain sectors of the industry have shown great improvement, however other sectors that are lagging far behind. This is especially true for those working on roofs and refurbishments as it seems that procedures on smaller projects are more lax than for larger projects.

The HSE will not sit back and let construction sites endanger the lives of workers, because it believes that most injuries and accidents can be avoided by normal precautions.

This initiative has been running for the past 3 years and this year, the HSE hopes to find better standards of precautions and safety checks. Mr. Whites has said that if the inspectors find unsafe construction sites, they will shut the sites down and even proceed against those responsible in a court of law.

Last year, HSE inspectors visited 1,759 sites and 2,145 contractors, after which they handed out 270 notices to cease work at unsafe sites, most of which involved working on heights.

To ensure your organisation is aware of its health and safety obligations and remains compliant with the latest Construction (Design and Management) Regulations for major building, maintenance or refurbishment work; a CDM coordinator can give advice and assistance to organisations on their role and the measures they must take to comply with CDM Regulations.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 5:53 am and is filed under Biz, Commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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