Working at Height
Did you know that falls from height are one of the biggest causes of serious injury and fatality in the UK workplace?
The HSE spend much of their enforcement activity on the most serious risks such as work at height. The Working at Height Regulations and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations place a clear responsibility on facilities managers, building owners and their agents to ensure that all contractors they directly engage with are trained to operate all mandatory equipment and that their work is completed safely.
This means that if you are an agent and you order a board that’s attached to a building, you are in control of a work at height activity. Accordingly you are required by the law to ensure all work is properly planned, supervised, equipment is fit for purpose and carried out by competent people.
Here are two examples where businesses have not fulfilled their duty to assess the competency of their contractors:
- Company A had not assessed the competency of a contractor engaged in what was assumed to be a relatively simple job of felling two trees. Consequently, a tree fell onto the track of an oncoming train causing over £100,000 in repair costs to two rail companies.
Company A received a fine of £40,000 and ordered to pay £5,854 in costs.
- Company B had not assessed the competency of a subcontractor, nor had they assessed how the subcontractor would carry out their duties whilst working at height. Consequently, an employee of the subcontractor fell through a fragile roof light, 8 metres to their death while cleaning the guttering on a roof.
Company B received a fine of £50,000 and ordered to pay £19,300 costs.
So what should you do? Legally you must ensure that your contractors are capable of undertaking the work you require from them and have suitable arrangements to ensure that this is carried out safely. You need to be sure that all legal requirements, particularly when working at height, are complied with.
Don’t be fooled: The HSE are prosecuting more and more regularly in the event of accidents and injuries and with the courts now able to impose unlimited fines, you simply cannot afford to take the risk of not vetting your contractors properly.
At Signboard we have a proven track record of working hard for our customers to make sure they are compliant, particularly when they commission work at height. Our membership of SafeContractor* is your guarantee that when you work with Signboard you benefit from a fully compliant, structured solution to ensure all work undertaken is properly planned, staff are trained and risks are rigorously assessed and reduced by established safe working practices.
*For the past 15 years, the SafeContractor risk assessment scheme has managed contractor assessments for over 230 major clients. The scheme’s highly experienced in-house health and safety professionals undertake pre-qualification assessments for over 22,000 contractors on an annual basis. Each contractors expertise is used to interpret the robust criteria of the scheme and determine what is acceptable in proportion to the size of the contractor’s company, the risks inherent in its undertakings, and the complexity of the work to be undertaken. The scheme is based upon core criteria but goes beyond legal compliance by asking activity specific information for higher risk activities so that clients can have added assurance that their contractors are competent to undertake the work for which they are accredited.