LARAC Executive Committee Members, Andrew Bird, Kitran Eastman and Mark Foxall recently attended the waste industry's first ever health and safety summit. The summit entitled 'Delivering the solution together was a high level get together for waste sector leaders with the aim to raise health and safety performance. The waste sector continues to be a poor performer for ill health, injuries and fatal accidents when compared with other industries and 'all industry averages' and recent falls in fatal accident numbers appear to have 'bottomed out'. Regrettably there have been 14 fatal accidents already in 2012/13 in the waste sector.
At the event a new health and safety strategy for the waste industry was launched in a bid to cut incident rates by 10% year-on-year and reduce the number of fatalities to zero.
The four year strategy comes as the chief executive of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), Judith Hackitt, highlighted the need for a hands on approach in improving health and safety.
The strategy was launched by Chris Jones, chair of the Waste Industry Safety and Health (WISH) forum (pictured), which co-hosted the event along with the HSE. Mr Jones said he hoped the strategy would help the industry become recognised as a safe industry to work in.
He said: “It is very easy to say what we hope the strategy will achieve and that is a reduction in the appalling rate of injury and ill health and death associated with industry.”
However he noted a “substantial improvement” in health and safety over the last decade, with some companies achieving over a 60% reduction in incident rates while figures suggested that the overall industry incident rate has been reduced by an average of 20%.
He added: “We need to continue the work and up our game and maintain our momentum. We need to continue to establish and share best practice. We need to continue to share the safety performance of the industry.”
The strategy outlines five key goals which all work towards the aim of reducing accident rates by 10% year-on-year and reducing the number of fatal incidents to zero. So far in 2012/13 fourteen people have died in industry related incidents.
The key goals are:
Strong leadership – encouraging strong leadership across the industry;
Involve the workforce – encourage organisations to ensure that employers, managers and workers work together to prevent ill-health and injuries;
Build competence – increase levels of competency across the industry;
Create healthier, safer workplaces; and,
Support SMEs – adapt and customise approached to help small and medium sized enterprises to comply with the health and safety obligations.
A number of objectives have been put in place to help achieve the goals. These include creating an effective health and safety culture, reducing the number of incidents and ill-health cases through intervention.
Also speaking at the event, Judith Hackitt, chair of the HSE, said action was needed to improve the sector’s performance and that a purely checkbox approach was likely to discourage people. Instead, she said a hands-on approach to health and safety was needed.
Judith Hackitt, chair of HSE, said a checkbox approach to health and safety was not effective
“If your health and safety system is all about paperwork and check boxes and over the top requirements it is not an effective way of keeping people safe at work. In fact I would probably suggest it is turning off quite a lot of people.
“We need sensible proportionate action which makes sense to those that are affected and those that have to work with it.”
She also questioned why members of the Environmental Services Association (ESA) could achieve a 60% decrease in incidents over five years and others in the industry could not. Ms Hackitt added that there is still a long way to go if the waste and recycling industry is to improve its health and safety performance. In a bid to achieve this, she said she had two key messages for the industry – firstly, a common approach is needed and secondly the industry needs to take action to deliver solutions.
Ms Hackitt said the HSE was working to make guidance and regulations simpler to understand. However, she added that there is no intent by the government or HSE to lower the standards.
“The one thing I want to emphasise is that what we are doing as a regulator to the regulations and the guidance and the code of practice is making them simpler and more accessible so that they are easier to work with. There is no intent on our part or on government to ease off and lower standards. It is all part to make it easier.”
Ms Hackitt’s comments on the need for a hands-on approach echoed those made by David Palmer-Jones, chair of the ESA and director of SITA UK, who said engagement with the industry was needed.
Mr Palmer-Jones called on the industry to rise to the challenge. “The concern is the safety record of our industry is not sustainable and we the industry, both the public and private sectors, need to take stock and rise to this challenge. This challenge is complex. Our industry is diverse and vibrant with over 140,000 workers and growing in both size and complexity.”
He said a check-box approach would not work and that engagement throughout the industry is the best way to achieve a more acceptable level of safety. “Only through engagement and breaking down the barriers between staff and their management can we reach a more acceptable level of safety.”
However, he noted that there were a number of barriers such as communication and language which needed to be overcome.
Presentations were also made at the event by Lawrence Waterman OBE, head of health and safety at the Olympic Delivery Authority and Mike Short, senior national officer for health and safety at trade union UNISON.
Commenting on the event, Mark Foxall, LARAC's Vice-Chair and WISH Forum representative said ''This was a high level event, well supported and with good representation from the local authority sector. The event acted as a necessary wake up call reminding all attendees of the need for genuine improvement in health and safety leadership, culture and performance. Thought-provoking and inspiring presentations were given by a number of speakers, highlighting that improving health and safety is clearly in everyone's interest, can be achieved given the right attention and is good for business rather than a hindrance.''
Below is Mark's report from the meeting:
Delivering the Solution Together
The waste management & recycling Industry
7th February 2013 – Solihull, Birmingham
Key Attendees (eg No, outside orgs etc) David Palmer-Jones - Chair of ESA; Judith Hackitt CBE – Chair of HSE; Lawrence Waterman OBE – Olympic Delivery Authority; Mike Short – Unison; Chris Jones – Chair of WISH; John Skidmore – President of CIWM; Heather Bryant - HSE
Approx 140 delegates from senior positions across the waste management sector.
Summary of Key Issues
The main topic of the event was to highlight the waste sector’s poor health and safety record. To compare this with other industry sectors and reinforce the need for change and improvement. The day was split into speaker sessions in the morning, followed by afternoon workshops on a range of topics with information from these sessions collated and fed back to all delegates.
David Palmer-Jones gave a welcome and introductions and chaired the morning proceedings whilst setting the scene for the event highlighting the waste sectors poor H&S record generally; noted that ESA members had achieved a 60% reduction in injury rates over the last 5 years.
Judith Hackitt provided the keynote address, again highlighting the waste sector’s poor H&S record, noting that the waste sector fatal accident rate is much higher than the all industry average and twice as bad as that for construction. Judith affirmed the HSE’s priority for focus are agriculture, construction and waste and their intervention for waste would centre on:
1. Local authorities whether with DSO or outsourced service
2. A structured approach with the top 15 waste companies looking at their management systems.
3. Hot spots such as skip hire currently and next year on MRFs.
Lawrence Waterman gave an insightful overview on the steps taken to embed a positive H&S culture across the range of construction projects to host the 2012 Olympics. Construction companies, suppliers etc were required to sign up to an H&S charter and senior employees from all involved companies were required to attend regular H&S meetings with no excuse for non-attendance. Daily briefings were held with all staff and not only did this improve safety performance it improved productivity through better communication and programming.
Mike Short – outlined Unison’s long standing role in protecting the H&S of employees working in Local Authorities, it was noted that with reducing LA budgets, less resource is being applied to H&S and a concerning development was that spend on personal
protective equipment was reducing.
Chris Jones gave an overview to the background of the WISH forum, stating that it was formed in May 2001 as a consequence of poor H&S performance, WISH was constituted in 2009 with a revised constitution agreed in 2012. WISH had contributed to the publication of 21 guidance notes for the waste sector and adopted its own H&S charter requiring constituent members to set out their own H&S action plan. Chris highlighted the ESA adopted H&S charter aim of a 10% year on year reduction in H&S incidents over a 5 year period and that this had been succeeded with performance showing a 12% year on year improvement.
Chris noted that already in 2012/13 the waste sector had witnessed 14 fatal accidents and that there was a clear need to re-focus efforts as the previous decline in fatal accidents appears to have now bottomed out. The focus for the coming period would be workplace supervisors and to improve the industry and the perception of the industry.
John Skidmore introduced the 5 themes for the afternoon workshops and delegates had been pre allocated the workshop they would attend, the 5 themes were;
1. Leadership
2. Competence
3. Worker involvement
4. Creating healthier safer workplaces
5. Customising support for SMEs
I attended the worker involvement workshop and the main themes arising from this were;
Waste was seen as a ‘macho’ work environment where it was considered wrongly acceptable by the manual workforce that they would suffer from time to time from an H&S incident and that this was ‘just part of the job’.
Task and finish was seen as a significant underlying cause to poor H&S practice, short cuts were taken in order to finish work quickly because of other, often external commitments, ‘childcare etc.’ T&F also impacted on the availability of staff to undertake H&S training/briefings.
H&S was sometimes seen by manual workforce as a tool with which management would ‘punish/impede’ the workforce.
The bad press that H&S received from certain media channels was unhelpful, H&S was wrongly viewed at best as a burden and at worst a hindrance to getting the job done.
Each of the workshop chairs fed back to the re-assembled delegates and a commitment was given that the feedback would be condensed, communicated and acted upon by the HSE/WISH forum where appropriate. One recurring theme was ‘what did H&S leadership look like?’ Delegates were directed to the HSE website and the Institute of Directors, where examples could be found.
A commitment was given that by the end of March a report on the day’s event would be made available. Presentations from today’s event would also be made available online via the HSE/WISH website.
Feedback/follow up for LARAC Executive
MF to communicate this report and follow up correspondence to the LARAC executive committee. Feature the event across the LARAC website, LOL, Policy Briefing as appropriate.
Policy Stance Implications
None foreseen
Completed by Mark Foxall – LARAC Vice Chair, 18/02/13
Mark's report is also available on our website - Login to the Members' Forum and go to Liaisons.
Click on the pdf file to access the timetable of events at the Summit.
