By Nigel Mair - our Health & Safety expert
By the time you read this article Christmas will have come and gone. I hope that you got everything that you wanted... remembering to recycle the cardboard boxes, of course! As the New Year starts it is traditional for us to think to the future and also to make resolutions to try and become ‘better people’. I therefore want to take this opportunity to make some resolution suggestions for you with a Health and Safety theme.
Resolution 1
The first resolution I think that you should make is to recognise that just because there haven’t been any accidents at your work doesn’t mean that everything is fine. In fact, in many cases it may be that an incident is lurking just around the corner, ready to leap out and bite you where it hurts!
This may sound a bit depressing, but I am afraid that the statistics back me up, with the waste industry still having an appalling safety record. To put this into some sort of perspective, all of the sites that I have visited over the last 12 months have had the potential for significant accidents. This will be of no great shock in a busy, vehicle based sector such as waste. What is perhaps more surprising is that at virtually every one there has been some activity that I have observed that has made me go “uh oh, that looks a bit dangerous!”
I know that it is obviously difficult to eliminate all risks from busy waste operations, but I am afraid that the law takes quite a strong view on your duties and under the HASAWA 1974 you need to provide “a safe place of work”. Therefore please don’t become complacent in the coming year and think that H&S just gets in the way of getting the job done... I can assure you that if there is an accident, then it most definitely will get in the way of work!
Resolution 2
If you can stick to resolution 1 then that is a good start, but I think that we should perhaps take the next step along the road to H&S saintdom.
The second resolution I would like to suggest is for you to think about your staff and the input that they can provide to your overall H&S. All too often staff are sidelined and viewed as being peripheral to the H&S processes within a company. If you were to take a look at your own organisation and ask yourself honestly, when would have been the last time that you actually asked your staff for their input on H&S?
You may think that this is an unnecessary inconvenience and I can almost hear you saying “Nigel, what are you on about, it is my business and I will do what I want.” This may be what you want to think, but again the law views things a little bit differently and in fact you actually have a legal duty to involve your staff through proper consultation.
Here is a suggestion for the coming 12 months... why not set up a simple series of meetings with some of your staff to actually listen to them about H&S? This is not about taking everything on board that they may say, but it is about providing a forum for them, listening to them and then giving them some feedback and involvement. To give you some idea of its value, I think that every time I have been out with a member of staff to watch them doing their job, perhaps as part of an NVQ assessment, they have mentioned some improvement, or safety issue that their employer should really know about, but has never bothered to ask! Take a moment to ask and listen and you may be surprised by the input that you will get from them.
Resolution 3
The final resolution I am going to mention really builds on the previous two and should be a regular part of your H&S system over the coming year. For number 3 I am going to suggest that you should carry out a H&S audit of your operations.
I am sure that you are close to what goes on at your work and that is great, but ironically it can also be a bit of a problem as you can often miss the obvious. In auditing terms the phrase ‘a fresh pair of eyes’ is often used. This does not have to mean using someone from outside the business (although this can be useful), as it is more down to a state of mind and being able to look at something from a dispassionate viewpoint, almost as if it was the first time you had seen it.
A good auditor should ask the sort of questions that might make you feel a bit uncomfortable - the why, how, when and who type of questions that nobody likes. Having said that it is certainly much better for these to be asked before an accident has happened, rather than as part of an incident investigation! Therefore plan to carry out an audit early in the New Year and use the results to shape your H&S approach for the remainder of the year - it will be time well spent.
Any accident is an accident too many and hopefully by adopting a positive approach to H&S this year can be a more profitable and safer one for all of us working within the waste industry.
Happy New Year!
Nigel Mair is a WAMITAB assessor and verifier and runs the North West Regional Assessment Centre, delivering WAMITAB qualifications and other H&S, waste and environmental training. If you have any questions for Nigel, please email them through to The Skip. contact us
