Introduction

So Health and Safety doesn’t immediately grab your attention? And maybe it seems a bit dull, a bit pointless or even, perhaps, a bit like common sense? Perhaps you’ve seen newspapers where the “elf and safety” are responsible for banning much of the things we in England hold dear?

Well I can’t promise to make it interesting. And nor do I intend debunking every media story (though I may post occasional links to the army of people who do so).

All I really know is that having seen another comment on a newspaper’s website earlier blaming the “health and safety brigade” (*disclaimer – I may not have copied the misspellings correctly) for various ills, I think there is space for a few more voices occasionally speaking for the other side.

So what is health and safety? What do we do? And why do we ban almost everything that people (especially, for some reason, Daily Mail readers) enjoy doing?

Well, perhaps not surprisingly, there is no simple answer. What do I spend most of my time doing? I try to make sure that construction projects are planned and run in a way that reduces the risk to the people working there. Obvious, you might think. Why do we need a specialist for that?  The answer is that maybe sometimes we don’t need a specialist, and that it is common sense. But a lot of the time, with the pressure being on people to finish early, to get the job done, the common sense is left behind, and apparently sensible people will take all manner of risks. And when I say risks – every year 30-40 people die in the construction industry, and many more are seriously injured. This is despite the best efforts of the government’s Health and Safety Executive inspectors (about who more in later posts) and us professionals, though the figures have improved recently.

In construction there are less obvious issues too that we must think about. If an architect designs a 30 storey tower made of glass, at some point said glass will need cleaning. Cleaning glass 200m in the air is neither a cheap nor particularly pleasant job, so perhaps it’s best to avoid it. Can we pay more upfront for “self-cleaning” glass? Or maybe the windows can invert so they can be cleaned from the inside? Or perhaps we can change the design so building it is made less risky in the first place.

These are some of the reasons that we are around as health and safety professionals. I’ll introduce more in the coming posts, but I hope so far you can see nothing has been banned, I’ve made no mention of conkers, and maybe it’s just made you think a bit.

*note - previously published at a different location