The construction press today is leading on the report produced for UCATT by the Centre for Corporate Accountability which found that half the workers killed in accidents on construction sites were either self-employed or worked for firms employing fewer than five people.
Alan Ritchie, General Secretary of UCATT concludes from this that, “small companies often do not take health and safety seriously, that is how tragedies occur”. His solution is for the HSE to adopt a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to safety and apply pressure all the year round to small companies. The report even found its way onto the Today programme on Radio 4.
He’s right in the sense that if you don’t take health and safety seriously, tragedies do occur. And sometimes they happen even when you do.
I remember talking a member who had only recently joined through the procedure for reporting his first ever serious accident to one of his workers as he tried to deal with what he had seen, what had happened to someone he knew and for whom he felt responsible and what he had to do to comply with the regulations..
Accidents can have a profound effect on a small company, because you as the employer know the individual, and because you know what that individual means to the business. Health and safety is vital, whatever size the company, and most small joinery businesses know that the price of health and safety is eternal vigilance.
One of the difficulties of running a small business is just keeping up with changes to regulations and requirements. Members who used our health and safety audit service have found that there was much more to address than they thought, mostly because, amidst everything else, they weren’t aware of changes to the regulations or good practice, or they simply hadn’t had the chance to act on them. On the plus side, once the audit report told them what needed to be done, it was usually straightforward.