For years we held membership of CHAS and Constructionline. We left them both. Not because of the charges – they were affordable enough. We left because Health and Safety as it currently operates is a gigantic lie that everyone is participating in. It’s hugely disingenuous. I’d imagine the majority already realise this, but of course people either keep their mouths shut, or pretend it’s not so, in order to keep their job, get paid, not be viewed as a difficult person, etc.
You cannot make on site practices safer by what you write on pieces of paper, and yes, we still supply risk assessments and method statements when they are requested, but that’s not what makes the work safe (far from it). If you have men on site that are not safe workers, writing things on bits of paper won’t make them safe.
Nobody is reading the risk assessment or method statement when they are building a scaffold, putting up ladders, rigging up ropes, etc. That never ever ever happens. If you forced the workers to really read that documentation, instead of pretend to read it, before they started work, what do you think that would change once they started doing the real hands on practical work? It changes absolutely nothing. “Oh I feel really safe today because I’ve revised the work at height regulations”……. If you are a worker and reading this you will know exactly what I mean. If you are not a worker maybe you believe those bits of paper make a difference, but they don’t, and you’ve been hoodwinked by the message they’ve been pounding into your head for years. It’s about legal cover and nothing more. Or maybe you know it’s a lie but you don’t have the courage to stand out from the crowd.
What prevents accidents on site are things like this (not an exhaustive list – but it covers some important points):
- Not rushing the erection or dismantling of the access.
- Not rushing as you move around at height.
- Placing extra anchors. Always have at least two separate anchors.
- If you are not sure about the anchors you’ve already got, create more.
- Think ahead about what you are going to do and how it’s going to work before you do it.
- Checking the equipment and spending the money to buy new equipment before you end up using dangerous old rubbish.
- Not trying to show everyone that you are the bravest maddest guy on the site (this is quite common and somewhat dangerous).
- It’s also good to avoid working with people that don’t care and will take you down with them.
- But the number one thing you need is a switch in your head that says, when needed, “That’s dodgy. I don’t want to get killed or smashed up. I’m going to do it a different way and make it safe. Yes it will take a bit longer, but that’s better than being dead, paralysed, or just injured badly and no longer able to earn a living”.
The reasons to start the big push for health and safety at work were very real. The world is full of unscrupulous employers who only care about profit, and countless people have been killed or maimed because of this. But what we have ended up with now is a dishonest system that treats adults like children and does not make people safer. It just gets them used to being told to do exactly as they are told all of the time, and H&S regulations actually sometimes force people to do things in such a profoundly stupid way that the task is made more dangerous. And it’s sometimes the case that the H&S enforcer can’t see how the regs’ imposed are making things more dangerous as he is not a worker and not very intelligent either, so the workers are forced into doing it a more dangerous way (this happens – I have seen it more than once).
Safe working is good. Lies and dishonesty are bad. A thing is not true even if everyone pretends it’s true.