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Tag Archives: standards

Flying the flag for the 40 year old Health and Safety at Work Act

Posted on June 29, 2014 by Nick Anderson

The 40 year old Health and Safety at Work Act’s rules are founded on common sense, but they’ve been hijacked by jobsworths

Summer is well under way, so we can expect the usual litany of patronising health and safety announcements on public transport and elsewhere. Among the blindingly obvious bits of advice that have apparently passed mankind by in the millennia since we started to walk upright are the following: we should wear loose-fitting clothes in the heat, make sure we drink plenty of water and sit down if we feel faint.

At Lord’s of all places, the players during the England v Sri Lanka Test stopped not for drinks, which have sustained cricketers since the first ball was bowled at the ground 200 years ago, but for a sponsored “hydration break”; and the crowds baking in the June sun were encouraged to take in plenty of liquid. They certainly did that, though not much of it was water.
 
The World Cup has brought a crop of health and safety stories, usually centred on whether or not the Cross of St George can be flown and in what circumstances. Gordon McGiffen, a south London bricklayer who displayed England flags on a brand new block of flats which is covered in scaffolding, was told to take them down because they posed a health and safety risk. “All I am trying to do is support England and I have been told I am not allowed to,” Mr McGiffen said.
 
His is a familiar lament. Health and safety has become synonymous with nanny statism, interfering jobsworths, ludicrous litigation and risk aversion. And yet the Health and Safety at Work Act, which is 40 years old this summer, has arguably saved more lives than any other piece of legislation, including the ban on drink driving or the compulsory wearing of seat belts in cars. It may well have reduced deaths by 5,000 or more.
 

So how did an Act that was by any measure a milestone in social reform turn into one of the most disparaged statutes of recent times? Partly it has to do with the way the law is interpreted – and often wrongly blamed for absurd restrictions imposed on perfectly innocuous practices. But it also reflects an absolutist view that it is possible to avoid accidental injury or death, rather than simply to reduce the circumstances in which they might occur.


However, the restrictions that are now imposed in the name of health and safety were far from the minds of parliamentarians in June 1974, as they put the finishing touches to the new law. MPs and peers were aware that this was not only pioneering legislation but potentially of great significance. The Act’s purpose was to implement the recommendations of the Robens Committee, which reported in 1972 and concluded that the existing workplace safety legislation was over-elaborate and confusing, with about 30 Acts and 500 sets of regulations.

Robens recommended a new structure underpinned by an enabling Act setting out the basic principles of safety responsibility, thereby providing a statutory base on which all future regulations could be founded. New rules would, if possible, be confined to general statements of the objectives to be achieved. Robens wanted greater reliance on standards and codes and for no regulation to be made at all if a non-statutory alternative was available. While many might question whether the ambition of fewer rules was realised, the legislation certainly did what it said on the tin.

Before the Act, 700 employees were dying every year on average and hundreds of thousands were being injured. Last year, the number of fatalities at work was down to 148 and non-fatal injuries have dropped by more than 75 per cent. Even for those of us who balk at excessive regulation, that is a considerable achievement, not least when you think that 500 workers have died on construction sites in Qatar since 2012, building the infrastructure for the World Cup in 2022. That certainly puts a ban on flags into perspective.

Throughout our history, health and safety laws have often been a reaction to appalling tragedies. In his ill-starred response to the pit disaster in Soma last month, in which 300 miners died, the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan cited examples from Britain’s industrial past to justify his own government’s inadequacies.

“I went back in British history,” he said. “Some 204 people died there after a mine collapsed in 1838. In 1866, 361 miners died in Britain. In an explosion in 1894, 290 people died there.” Indeed they did – but what is important is to learn the lessons. For instance, in 1862, when the beam of a pumping engine at Hartley Colliery in Northumberland broke and blocked the only mineshaft and means of ventilation, suffocating 204 miners, new legislation required that every seam should have at least two shafts or outlets.

Even as the more recent Health and Safety at Work Act was going through Parliament, an explosion at a chemical plant at Flixborough near Scunthorpe killed 28 people. Subsequent regulations imposed new rules on manufacturers who use dangerous substances. Why the Act was important is that is set out to prevent the accidents happening in the first place, rather than reacting to the death and injuries they cause, by which time it’s too late.

Forty years on, the Act has achieved what it set out to do, which is to insist upon high standards of health and safety in places of work. All we need do now is to apply the law with the common sense that inspired it in the first place.

Article shared from The Telegraph. 

Posted in News, Resources | Tags: current, HASAWA, health and safety news, HSE, law, legal, legislation, management, news, regulations, standards, work, workplace | Leave a comment |

The HSE Management Standards for Work Related Stress

Posted on March 20, 2014 by Nick Anderson

The HSE Management Standards for Work Related Stress.

What is stress and why do we need to tackle it?

The Stress Management Society defines stress as “a situation where demands on a person exceed that person’s resources or ability to cope”.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) defines stress as “the reaction people have to excessive pressures or other types of demands placed on them”.

The HSE says there is a convincing link between stress and ill health. Its recent research showed that over 13.5 million work days were lost to stress in the UK in 2007 / 2008, costing society £4 billion each year.

Other findings were:

  • 11% of absence is attributed to stress
  • 52% say stress is increasing
  • 60% say stress is damaging staff retention
  • 83% think stress is harming productivity.

Too much stress can cause illnesses such as heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure, stomach ulcers and depression. It can cause accidents, skin disease, alcohol and drug abuse, violence and family tensions and breakdowns. Stressed workers are also less productive and more prone to errors.

In Europe, nearly one in three workers (more than 40 million workers) claim that they are adversely affected by stress in the workplace.

The Institute of Management estimate that 270,000 people take time off work because of stress, which costs British companies around £538 per employee.

Tackling work related stress – the legal case.

Whilst there is no specific law on stress, employers do have legal duties to reduce the risk of stress to an acceptable level. The laws that apply are:

Section 2 (1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974:

“It shall be the duty of every employer to ensure, as far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of all his employees”.

Regulation 3 (1) (a) of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999:

“Every employer shall make a suitable and sufficient assessment of … the risks to the health and safety of his employees to which they are exposed whilst they are at work.”

Paragraph 80 of the accompanying Code of Practice:

“When allocating work to employees, employers should ensure that the demands of the job do not exceed the employee’s ability to carry out the work without risk to themselves or others.”

The business case

Tackling stress brings business benefits. Research has shown work related stress to have adverse effects for organisations in terms of employee commitment, performance and productivity, turnover of staff, attendance and potential litigation.

The moral case

As already stated, the HSE says that there is now convincing evidence that work related stress has an adverse effect on health, with links between stress, and physical and psychological effects.

The Management Standards for Tackling Work Related Stress

The HSE has designed the standards approach to help employees manage the causes of work related stress. Organisations are now expected to carry out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment for stress, and to take action to tackle any problems identified by that risk assessment.

By taking action to tackle the causes of stress in the workplace, the problems highlighted above can be prevented.  Tackling the causes of stress can also prevent ill health.

The management standards approach requires managers, employees and their representatives to work together to improve certain areas (6) of work, which will have a positive effect on employee well-being.

The six management standards cover:

  • Demands – workload, problems and environment
  • Control – how much say a person has in the way they work
  • Support – encouragement and resources provided
  • Role – Do people understand the role
  • Change – how organisational change is managed
  • Relationships – avoiding conflict and dealing with unacceptable   behaviour.

For each of these areas, the HSE gives a state which employers should aim to achieve. These are:

  • Demands – Employees indicate that they are able to cope with their jobs.
  • Control – Employees indicate that they are able to have a say about the way they do their work.
  • Support – Employees indicate that they receive adequate information and support from their colleagues and superiors.
  • Role – Employees indicate that they understand the role and responsibilities.
  • Change – Employees indicate that the organisation engages them frequently when undergoing an organisational change.
  • Relationships – Employees indicate that they are not subjected to unacceptable behaviour; e.g. Bullying at work.

Perhaps the best tool available from the HSE is the Indicator Tool. It is a 35 question survey, and all questions relate to the six primary stressors identified above (The Management Standards). It has been designed to support the process by allowing the workforce to rate how the organisation performs in managing the risks associated with work related stress.

The HSE suggests that companies can, if they choose to, use the Indicator Tool as a stand alone measuring device, and I guess many companies will do just that, using it as a box ticking exercise; when in fact analysing the findings, together with other data such as sickness absence rates, employee turnover, and accident data will provide much more information to work with.

The HSE also provides a Competency Indicator Tool, designed to allow managers or other responsible people in an organisation to assess whether behaviours identified as effective for preventing and reducing stress at work are part of the managers repertoire or not. The aim is to encourage managers to self assess their own behaviour and management style.

Together with the Indicator Tool,this is the most important part of the management standards approach. The Competency Indicator Tool is a comprehensive analysis, questioning a managers own integrity, approach, how they manage emotions, problem solving skills, communication skills, and reasoning skills. A percentage score is calculated at the end of the survey, and advice is given for highlighted areas in which development is needed. The survey will clearly show which behaviours could be used more often in the future in order to be more effective at preventing and reducing stress in the manager’s team.

Case Studies

The HSE website has some useful case studies of other companies (private and public sector) and how they have dealt with stress. Some of the cases demonstrate that companies are merely ticking boxes; some have excelled and have really made stress management a priority for their business or organisation. The HSE makes no distinction between the good and bad case studies, and careful consideration should be given before applying any of these case studies to a work situation.

See the HSE website for more details : http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/index.htm

Posted in Resources | Tags: HSE, management, resources, standards, stress, work | Leave a comment |
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