Since 01 August 2018 new qualification requirements have been in effect for all new applications for this card.

What are the new requirements?

You must meet the criteria for one of two routes, depending on your existing qualifications:

Route 1: Do you already hold a JIB approved electrical theory qualification?

If you already have a JIB-approved electrical theory qualification such as C&G2365,2330 or 2360(or EAL Equivalents)this will be accepted for your labourers card. A full list of approved qualifications is available via www.ecscard.org.uk/labourer. You will also need to pass the ECS Health, Safety and Environmental Assessment.

Route 2:If you don’t hold a JIB- approved electrical theory qualification…

You’ll need the following:

Successful completion of the following Health & Safety Courses:

Safety Pass Alliance (SPA) Core H&S Course not the SPA MPQC Core

2. You only need to sit a separate ECS Health, Safety & Environmental Assessment if you passed the above courses over three years ago.

Assessment. If you have taken the courses listed in item 1 within the last three years, you do not have to sit the separate ECS HS&E Assessment.

3. Proof of employment in the electrical industry This needs to be in the form of a written reference from your employer to confirm you are employed by that company. If you normally work for an employment business or labour

A new building safety regulator is to be established within the Health & Safety Executive.

The building safety regulator is a new official post that is being created as part of the government’s Building Safety Programme, set up in response to the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London.

The legal standing of the building safety regulator will be established by building safety legislation that the government is planning to bring forward. Until then, the regulator will initially be in shadow form, housing secretary Robert Jenrick told the House of Commons.

Dame Judith Hackitt, the former HSE chair who led the government’s post-Grenfell review of building regulations, will chair a board to oversee the transition to the new regime.

“I expect the shadow regulator to be established within weeks, and we will be recruiting the first national chief inspector of buildings,” Robert Jenrick said.

Asked whether the hard-pressed HSE would get any additional funding to take on this new responsibility, the secretary of state promised: “We will, of course, give the Health & Safety Executive the funding required to set up the regulator. We chose the Health & Safety Executive, as opposed to creating a stand-alone building safety regulator, precisely because it has the expertise and the capacity and is ready to get going at pace, which I think we can all agree is essential.”

HSE chair Martin Temple said: “We are proud the government has asked HSE to establish the new building safety regulator. HSE’s vast experience of working in partnership with industry and others to improve lives will ensure people are confident the creation of the new regulator is in good hands.”

The £4.9bn Tideway tunnel is using river transport to cut road congestion and reduce the project’s impact on London’s air quality. CM reports.

Tideway is London’s latest giant infrastructure project and the spoil excavated will total a staggering 3.7 million tonnes, of which 3.1 million will come from the 25km-long and 7m-wide main tunnel. Transporting all this material by road would normally mean chaos on the capital’s roads and pollution choking the air.

“Construction traffic not only adds to congestion, it poses a risk to the safety of other road users and pedestrians and can have a significant impact on local air quality,” says Daniel Marsh, from King’s College London’s Environmental Research Group, which provides air quality information and research in the UK.

However, the £3.8bn Tideway scheme is taking a different logistics approach – transporting over 95% of the spoil from the tunnel and riparian sites via the Thames.

This was a contractual obligation on the ‘super sewer’ scheme and Tideway says it is investing £54m in its ‘More By River’ strategy.

The spoil is being taken away using a fleet of over 25 barges, which are towed by tugs chiefly to landfill sites downstream. As well as freeing up roads, Tideway says a study it has commissioned indicates that transporting materials by river has reduced the impact of the project on London’s air quality.

“One of our largest 1,600-tonne barges, for example, can carry as much material as almost 100 lorries,” explains Tideway head of environmental sustainability Darren White. “This has obvious benefits for cyclists, pedestrians and other road users.

 “But beyond that, the new data shows that Tideway’s use of the river has dramatic effects on the impact of its work on air quality.”

Compared to a modern HGV carrying the equivalent cargo, a tug towing a 1,000-tonne barge will produce up to 95% fewer pollutants (see box).

The tugs are diesel powered, though White says Tideway is “looking into cleaner technology for the engines”.

“The air quality benefits of using tugs and barges [instead of lorries] increases when larger barges are used,” he adds. “Tideway’s barges range in capacity from between 800 and 1,600 tonnes.”

The dispersion of emissions from the tugs was also analysed. A comparison of the average tug emission rate with the emission rate from 50 HGVs travelling at 20km/h found the lorries to be 2.3 times higher, Tideway says.

“The study found that average emissions from tug ‘Felix’ contributed less than 0.13µg/cu m to concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, even at locations very close to the tug,” says White. “The European standard for nitrogen dioxide levels is 40µg/cu m.” (The concentration of an air pollutant is measured in micrograms – one-millionth of a gram – per cubic metre of air, or µg/cu m.)

White continues: “Given that the tugs will generally travel at distances greater than 50m from the bank of the Thames – and therefore from the closest receptors – the contribution to nitrogen dioxide concentrations from tug emissions at this distance is just 0.01µg/cu m.”

Overall, Tideway’s use of the river to transport materials has reduced its on-road freight requirement by 72%, a significant reduction in pollution exposure risk for London’s population.

Meanwhile, the excavated spoil will end up at riverside receptor sites in Rainham, Ingrebourne Valley, East Tilbury and Pitsea, with the majority being used for landfill restoration. Work on Tideway, which started in 2015 and is now under way at all 24 of its sites across London, is anticipated to be completed in 2024.

Construction Magazine

Urgent action is needed to tackle the stagnation in the number of people killed or injured in collisions involving drivers working or travelling on business, according to IAM RoadSmart.

The road safety charity’s concerns about a worrying lack of progress in driving down the number of work-related traffic incidents are highlighted in its latest white paper, ‘The Role of Business Drivers.’

In the paper IAM RoadSmart calls on all groups – the Health and Safety Executive, drivers and their employers, government and police – to do more to address the fact that there has been virtually no change in the number of fatal and serious injury road crashes on UK roads in the last decade.

The number of collisions involving people driving for business has remained static, at one in four of all incidents, over the same period.

In 2009 there were 5,442 serious and fatal crashes in Britain involving an at-work driver; in 2018 this had risen to 5,506.

The paper also highlights some alarming practices and attitudes when it comes to employers and their drivers:

• Nearly half of business leaders polled (49%) expect their employees to answer their phone at any time, including while driving for work;
• Just over one in eight employees who drive for work (13%) and more than one in 20 leaders (6%) consider the hard shoulder a safe place to take a work call;
• One in six UK employees who drive for work (17%) say they have been involved in an incident when driving for work due to a phone call from a colleague.

Neil Greig, IAM RoadSmart Director of Policy and Research, says in the report: “Employers need to do more to drive change across their workforce and to take their responsibilities to keep staff safe, particularly when they’re behind the wheel for business.”

The report also highlights the issue of the so-called ‘grey fleet’ drivers – those using privately owned vehicles for work-related journeys. This growing sector is one in which employers still need to exercise their responsibility for staff health and safety, IAM RoadSmart claims.

Tony Greenidge, IAM RoadSmart business development director, says in the report: “The penny hasn’t dropped for many organisations that their responsibility for a grey fleet driver is exactly the same as for a company car driver.”

He added separately: “If companies are expecting their employees to use their own vehicles for business journeys, they must ensure they are doing so safely and with appropriate guidelines, if they are to stay within the law.”

IAM RoadSmart claims responsibility for the disappointing lack of progress in reducing the number of collisions involving people driving for business must be shared between government, HSE, police, employers, vehicle manufacturers and drivers themselves.

It adds that the Corporate Manslaughter Act introduced in 2007 was expected to underpin safer business driving and safer roads objectives – but to date, not a single person has been prosecuted or sent to jail under it in relation to death caused by a company car driver.

Tony said: “Where there is clear evidence of poor driving behaviour no employer of a driver involved in an avoidable death while undertaking a business journey has been anywhere near a prosecution. It seems the legislation has proved difficult to apply.”

IAM RoadSmart has called for road safety to be at the heart of procurement practice in UK industry. It says that if a business cannot demonstrate a strong commitment to legislation compliance with regards driving for work safety, then they run the increasing risk that they might be disadvantaged when bidding for contracts in both the private and public sector.

SHP

Over the past few decades, there have been significant improvements in health and safety on food and drink manufacturing sites, with the overall injury rate dropping by over 50% since 1990/91. However, the sector is still responsible for over a quarter of all manufacturing injuries – more than 5,000 incidents are reported to the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) each year.

The need to reduce this figure further is perhaps more critical than ever. Not only do employers have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure the safety of their workers, but there are heavy financial penalties in place for companies that breach safety regulations. The Sentencing Council’s Definitive Guideline, which came into effect in 2016, now calculates penalties based on company turnover rather than profitability. As a result, food companies have been on the receiving end of some of the largest fines since the Guideline was introduced.

As an alternative to traditional manual labour, progressive cavity (PC) pumps can automate some of the key processes on food manufacturing sites. Here, Lesley Eaton, Marketing Executive for PC pump specialist SEEPEX UK, explains how this is helping to de-risk six of the main food factory hazards…

1. Slips and trips

According to the HSE, slips and trips are responsible for 35% of major injuries in the food and drink industry. The vast majority (90%) of slips occur when the floor is wet or contaminated with food. Transferring liquids and pastes manually via buckets or tote bins brings an inherent risk of spillages, so pumping these products instead of physically handling them eliminates this risk and significantly cuts the likelihood of a slip occurring. It also has the added effect of decreasing the number of people on the factory floor.

While pumps are renowned for their ability to transfer liquids, they are not always considered for viscous products or those containing large soft solids; such as sweet and savoury pie fillings, or yogurts and sauces containing whole fruit pieces. Yet thanks to their gentle, low shear handling action, PC pumps are able to transfer such products efficiently without damaging them; further decreasing the chance of the factory floor becoming a slip hazard.

2. Conveyors

Conveyors are involved in 30% of all machinery accidents in the food and drink industry – more than any other type of equipment. By switching to a PC pump, food producers can transfer not just liquids and semi-solids, but also solid foodstuffs, such as whole chicken breasts. By automating the handling of such products and eliminating the need for conveyors, the risk of operator injury is significantly reduced.

In addition, pumps and associated pipework are much easier to clean and maintain than conveyors and require less exposure to harsh cleaning chemicals.

3. Manual handling

In the food and drink industry, around 1,700 acute injuries per year are attributed to manual handling. By automating food transfer duties, thereby reducing the number of people required to handle foodstuffs, this figure can be significantly cut.

One process which is particularly suitable for automation is waste handling. For most food operations, this is not a core business activity, so diverting labour away from this task towards more lucrative areas also makes sound financial sense.

For example, SEEPEX has delivered automated, fully enclosed, piped waste removal systems to a number of food manufacturing sites, including Natures Way Foods. Featuring an integrated chopping and pumping system which can handle large solid food items such as mango stones, cabbages and even whole chickens, these solutions can help to reduce manual handling-related injuries at food factories.

They are also safer to maintain. Traditionally-designed PC pumps contain heavy components but in the case of SEEPEX’s Smart Conveying Technology, for example, the weight of the stator is reduced by 75%. Instead of a single unit, the pump stator is comprised of two halves, making it much lighter and safer when removing for essential maintenance.

4. Workplace transport

The second highest cause of fatal accidents on food and drink sites is workplace transport. Each year, over 200 people in food factories are struck by fork lift trucks. Enclosed piped waste removal systems such as those mentioned above eliminate the need for fork lift trucks entering the food production site. Instead, waste can be piped directly out of the factory and straight into a collection vehicle, away from high traffic areas.

5. Corrosive and abrasive materials

Some ingredients contain allergic or irritant properties, making them harmful to the skin in their concentrated state; for example, fruit acids such as malic acid. Automating the dosing process by using a PC dosing pump, rather than manually dosing, reduces the risk of exposure to the skin.

Cleaning chemicals used to sterilise equipment – such as sodium hypochlorite – can also irritate skin and even cause respiratory problems. The HSE states that cleaning-in-place (CIP) systems are a safer option for the internal disinfection of plant and equipment. Many PC pumps now come with CIP as standard, meeting the exacting requirements of the food industry without compromising employee safety.

One such example is SEEPEX’s latest hygienic PC pump; the first to meet stringent European Hygienic Engineering and Design Group (EHEDG) standards under its new testing regime. The BCFH pump range guarantees residue-free cleaning at a lower temperature and with lower chemical concentration than is normal for other CIP solutions.

6. Noise

Industrial hearing loss is the occupational disease with the highest number of civil claims, accounting for approximately 75% of all claims. Averaging 85-95 decibels, pneumatic noise and compressed air is the fifth highest process particularly associated with high noise levels.

Such is the noise impact created by air-operated diaphragm pumps – exacerbated by the fact that they are often left to run continuously – that manufacturers supply them with sound screening. By contrast, PC pumps – which only run when needed – emit considerably fewer decibels. Requiring no sound screening, they pose a lower risk to employees’ hearing.

The cost of doing nothing

While replacing manual labour with intelligent PC pumps and automated waste removal systems will increase operational efficiency and reduce costs, it is also clear that it brings significant safety benefits to food manufacturing sites. With the average fine in the 10-month period following the introduction of the new sentencing guideline increasing from £40,500 to £221,700, can any food business afford to not make the switch?

Factory Equipment .com

Since the new sentencing guidelines were introduced in February 2016, health and safety failings have become increasingly expensive for construction companies, who must also keep on top of changing regulations. Ian McKinnon offers a solution.

While prioritising health and safety is a moral obligation for any organisation, it also makes good business sense, especially as the cost of getting health & safety wrong continues to rise. 

Impact of legislation

Since the introduction of the new sentencing guidelines for health and safety offences in February 2016, which set out to ensure it wasn’t “cheaper to offend than to take the appropriate precautions”, fines for health & safety offences have skyrocketed.

The average fine per conviction pre-guidelines in 2015/16 was £57,735, while the average fine per conviction in 2018/19 soared to £107,000.

In the construction industry in 2018/19, there were 158 prosecution cases with 146 (92%) resulting in a conviction for at least one offence and a total of £15.7million in fines. Million-pound fines are now commonplace and, notably, since the introduction of the guidelines, a death no longer needs to occur for large fines of over £1m to apply. What’s more, it is now the risk of harm that is recognised as the offence so increasingly large fines are being handed down without any actual harm taking place.

Indirect costs

If hefty and rising fines aren’t enough of a cause for concern, indirect costs of health and safety failings must also be taken into account.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Accidents (RoSPA) suggests most organisations do not know what accidents and ill-health really cost them in time and money with a common misconception being that most accident and incident costs are recoverable through insurance.

Uninsured costs to consider include: the cost of incident investigation; business disruption; project delays; legal costs; repairs to plant & equipment and sick pay; extra wages and temporary labour. The impact of reputational damage can also be significant resulting in a loss of new or repeat business and deterring investment.

Cost to the economy

There are also implications of health & safety failings for the economy at large. Around two million working days were lost in construction each year between 2016/17 and 2018/19 with 19% due to workplace injury and 81% due to work-related illness. The total cost to the economy of workplace injury and new cases of work-related ill health in construction in 2018/19 is estimated at £1.2bn which accounts for 8% of the total cost.

Managing the supply chain

With the construction industry characterised by a large number of contractors and sub-contractors, one of the most challenging aspects of managing health and safety in the sector is ensuring compliance throughout the supply chain. Anyone engaging contractors has health and safety responsibilities, both for the contractors and anyone else that could be affected by their activities. Therefore a contractor assessment process needs to be in place.

Companies can carry out contractor assessment themselves but constantly changing rules and regulations make it a complicated and costly process so it is rarely efficient or effective for them to do so. This is where third party accreditation bodies such as CHAS come in. For example, CHAS’s alert system notifies contractors when insurance policies and health and safety qualifications are about to expire helps to ensure contractors’ qualifications are up-to-date.

CHAS recently introduced its Common Assessment Standard (CAS) available which offers businesses a single, complete risk management solution. Led by Build UK and the Civil Engineering Contractors Association (CECA), the Common Assessment Standard replaces a multitude of prequalification schemes with a simplified process based on a single industry-agreed questionnaire. Over 30 of the construction industry’s biggest names have announced their support for the scheme since it was launched in May 2019.

Ian McKinnnon is managing director of CHAS. 

Construction Manager

The Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) has today revealed further details about the 69 competencies in its updated framework for the OSH profession.

Expectations of professionals working in health and safety have changed significantly in the past decade. As businesses strive to become more sustainable, OSH professionals must demonstrate a range of competencies to embed good health, safety and wellbeing effectively in workplace cultures.

Factors influencing change and transformation, including increased business complexity, technological advances, the gig economy and evolving platforms and processes, all challenge the capability of today’s OSH professionals.

This new competency framework – Professional standards for safety and health at work – expands on strong technical skills, to include the ‘soft skills’ and business skills OSH professionals need to influence and drive change.

The 69 competencies are divided into 12 areas across Technical, Core and Behavioural categories.

They are:

• Technical
  • Health and safety law
  • Risk management
  • Incident management
  • Culture
  • Sustainability
• Core
  • Strategy
  • Planning
  • Leadership and management
• Behavioural
  • Stakeholder management
  • Personal performance
  • Communication
  • Working with others

The newly updated competency framework covers all the skills, knowledge and behaviours needed by occupational safety and health professionals.

It reflects the findings of an extensive research project which included focus groups, desktop research and analysis of over 250,000 data sets from Blueprint, IOSH’s first generation self-assessment tool.

Vanessa Harwood-Whitcher, Director of Professional Services said:

“As the Chartered body that sets the standards for occupational safety and health, one of IOSH’s key roles is to help OSH professionals keep pace with rapid change in the workplace.

“When combined with the enhanced tools coming from IOSH in 2020, the new competency framework will help to drive the highest standards of capability within the profession. In the meantime, it is a powerful resource that individuals and their managers can use to steer career development and optimise team performance.”

The release of the updated framework will be followed in 2020 by the launch of an enhanced suite of practical tools to assist employers and professionals.

These will include Blueprint 2.0, a new CPD scheme, new technical guides and a free Career Hub for members, with access to thousands of learning resources and career planning tools.

Visit the competency framework web page for more information.

Despite having some of industry’s most hazardous working environments, a sector that pioneered the adoption of digital technology has been slow to exploit artificial intelligence and machine learning in the area of health and safety.

It’s no secret – oil and gas industry leaders acknowledge they have been slow to embrace digital technologies. A recent Boston Consulting Group report sums it up well: “The oil and gas industry is not an easy place to go digital.” Digitisation brings with it the promise of improved safety and efficiency, yet many companies still have a long way to go. It may be surprising to learn that some businesses even lack the technology to locate their workers ‒ which has clear and potentially dire implications for emergency situations.

This is partly because most of the industry is still deeply rooted in 20th-century methodologies, systems and processes. A report by McKinsey & Company notes that oil and gas companies were actually pioneers in the first digital age of the 1980s and 1990s, making use of 3D seismic imaging to model refineries and advanced process control for operations. But more recently, digital advancements have been limited, occurring in silos. As a whole, the industry is barely digitised end to end, and for the most part relies on legacy technologies. Full digitalisation has proved elusive, but that is beginning to change.

Thirty years ago, ‘connectivity’ meant expensive satellites linking up remote locations. Now, coverage is both pervasive and cheaper thanks to mobile networks. With 5G, private cellular networks will soon be an option for oil rigs and fields in remote locations. What’s more, there are fully interoperable IP communication devices, compared to 20 years ago when such devices were proprietary and lacked the protocols to connect seamlessly to different devices. This has given oil and gas companies a new lease of life and the keys to an AI-based future.

Energy companies generate a huge amount of data, and yet historically have only used a small proportion. Thanks to artificial intelligence and advanced wireless networks – and soon 5G – data can be computed and analysed locally, at low cost and with no lag time. This translates into real-world advancements that can lead to better health, safety and security for a crew using smart sensors, poisonous fume detectors, IP cameras and vibration sensors, to name a few.

For example, wearable sensors can provide real-time monitoring to pinpoint workers who might be at risk and can alert the rest of the crew. IoT-connected wearables such as safety jackets and helmets are already being used by some oil and gas companies for the detection of hazardous gas.

AI, machine learning and robotics can also reduce health and safety risks by carrying out remote-maintenance operations, reducing or even negating the need for physical inspections. By deploying a fleet of digital agents, oil and gas companies can not only react faster when equipment fails, but also prevent failures from occurring in the first place.

Data modelling, which uses AI and neural networking to interpret vast quantities of sensor data, can reveal the exact impact of explosions and leakages. Many more companies could be using such analytics to assess the effectiveness of health and safety drills, predict malfunctions and increase efficiency within workflows. For enterprises with ambitious sustainability targets, AI, ML and related technologies will become increasingly important tools to achieve these efficiencies.

The benefits are easy to see, but digitisation brings with it challenges, too. Among these, algorithm design is perhaps the trickiest. To reap the benefits of technology advancement, oil and gas companies need to learn to trust AI while at the same time retaining accountability for any actions arising from its use or misuse. Algorithmic design needs to take into account how AI interacts with the people around it. It’s a modern twist on an age-old conundrum. Human factors are notoriously hard to account for, yet if anything goes wrong in an AI-driven world, blaming the algorithm won’t pass muster with regulators and political leaders.

Challenges also exist in the form of legacy technology and traditional mindsets. Forecasts suggest significant oil and gas production will continue through at least 2050. But the way the industry operates, its processes, technologies and workflows will change dramatically in the coming decades. Oil and gas executives must embrace the new digital dawn today to prepare their companies for radically different future.

Creating a multi-stage digitisation roadmap is a great start. Any such initiative needs to have clear outcomes in mind, a realistic assessment of potential return on investment and a plan for harmonising engineering systems from a health and safety perspective. This can be especially challenging in large siloed divisions and companies. Yet it is within these complex ecosystems that advanced analytics, AI and ML can have the most impact ‒ delivering improved health and safety, more sustainable operations and reduced costs. The key is to start planning now for a sustainable future that will arrive sooner than you think – as it has in most other industries.

Charlotte Brown is sector director for energy at consulting firm Tessella. Didier Pagnoux is director of Altran’s World Class Center for IoT Solutions.

E&T

Two men who ran a plastics manufacturing firm in Birmingham have been sentenced to serve 12 weeks in prison, suspended for 12 months, after a court heard they ignored concerns raised over Legionella bacteria in a cooling tower at their business premises.

Birmingham Magistrates’ Court was told that, between June 2017 and February 2018, Kulwant Singh Chatha and partner Satpaul Kaur Chatha of Isher Hangers exposed employees of Isher Hangers, as well as members of the public, to Legionellosis at the site, which was situated in the vicinity of two local hospitals.

An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found concerns raised by their own water treatment consultants were ignored, and no Legionella risk assessments were in place.

Kulwant Singh Chatha and Satpaul Kaur Chatha pleaded guilty to breaching s 2(1) and s 3(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act and were each sentenced to serve 12 weeks in prison, suspended for 12 months, and ordered to pay costs of £12,115 each.

“Isher Hangers was operating a cooling tower without biocide, ignoring the advice of their own consultants,” said HSE inspector Karen Sweeney. “Cooling towers have the potential to spread bacteria that can cause serious illness or death, if not maintained in accordance with the published guidelines.”

IOSH