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Posted at 03:33 PM in Health & Safety Staff, Jobs in Health & Safety, Recruitment, Useful information, What we've been up to. | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
We just received a timely reminder from our lawyers Brabners Chaffe Street about the changes to the RIDDOR regs that are coming in on the 6th April. You can read the whole article here, but in a nutshell the changes are designed to make employers lives easier by extending the absence trigger from 3 days to 7. The 10 day time limit for reporting absences to the HSE will also increase to 15 days.
It is hoped that these changes will not only reduce the administrative burden on businesses, but will also result in a more accurate picture of a company's true safety record.
Posted at 10:40 AM in Business, Health & Safety Staff, Jobs in Health & Safety, Recruitment, Useful information | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
A 2011 salary survey for construction industry professionals has just been released by Career Structure - if you're a health & safety professional or a civil engineer it is well worth a look.
Posted at 11:40 AM in Health & Safety Staff, Jobs in Health & Safety, Recruitment, Useful information | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: civil engineering, engineer, h&s, health and safety, salary survey
Good news for Occupational Health and Safety Advisors and Environmental Health Officers hoping to emigrate to Australia… both occupations were added to the Skilled Occupation List (SOL) with effect from 1 July 2011! H&S Advisors and EHOs were two of thirteen occupations which have been added to the list to meet the changing needs of the Australian labour market.
The age cut-off for skilled migrants has also increased from 45 to 49 years, to recognise the potential of experienced skilled workers in their mid to late 40s.
New Level Recruitment is currently working on a number of roles in Sydney, Brisbane and the Queensland Gold Coast so if you’re interested in working in Australia please get in touch. We currently have vacancies in Australia for Civil and Geotechnical Engineers with Highways, Rail and Infrastructure experience, Occupational Hygienists with Asbestos and Air Monitoring experience and we hope to have some H&S jobs shortly, so please register your interest now! Contact Helen@newlevelrecruitment.com
Posted at 04:01 PM in Health & Safety Staff, Jobs in Health & Safety, Useful information | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
IOSH issued a response yesterday to Lord Young's report into Health & Safety, broadly welcoming it as a "...long overdue attempt to restore the reputation..." of the Health & Safety profession, but has published some suggestions of areas that it feels should be looked at. In the IOSH news bulletin, Rob Strange, the Chief Exec. of IOSH stated:
"We welcome the coalition government’s review, and its scrutiny of what David Cameron describes as the ‘damaging compensation culture’ that has over-shadowed genuine health and safety issues over the last few years. For that alone it marks a turning point.
“But we urge the government not to opt for overly simplistic solutions that compromise standards and leave hard-working people vulnerable. Weaken health and safety, and you risk weakening both public health and the national economy.”
The full response document is entitled "Getting the balance right" and is available here.
Posted at 12:56 PM in Business, Health & Safety Staff, Jobs in Health & Safety, Useful information | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
"More details on how the new accreditation scheme for practitioners is going to operate were revealed today during an online SHP debate.
Five health and safety experts gave their views, and answered listeners’ questions, on OSCR – the Occupational Safety Consultants Register, which is due to go live in the New Year. The proposed scheme has caused some concern among practitioners, who fear it will freeze out extremely experienced albeit not sufficiently highly qualified health and safety consultants.
Director of professional affairs at IOSH, Hazel Harvey, emphasised that nobody will be stopped from working as a result of not being on the register. She explained: “This is a voluntary register for consultants who meet the eligibility criteria – not being on it will not stop you from getting work.”
To be eligible to sign up, candidates must be chartered members of IOSH, the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, and/or the Royal Environmental Health Institute of Scotland; or fellows of the IIRSM. Hazel revealed today that fellows of the British Occupational Hygiene Society (BOHS) and the Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors (IEHF – formerly the Ergonomics Society) will most likely be able to join too – although this is still to be approved by the stakeholder group, at its next meeting scheduled for later this month.
Initially, the register was going to be open to safety consultants only but it is now likely – pending the outcome of the aforementioned meeting – that occupational-health specialists will be eligible. Those who are not affiliated to the institutions involved may also be considered in the future, as Hazel Harvey explained: “IOSH is currently lobbying the HSE to use a standards-based approach so that non-members can join.
“We do firmly believe in standards but we wouldn’t expect the standards applied to be any less than those for chartered membership. Assessment against set standards could be the way forward but this wouldn’t be easier than becoming a chartered member. There won’t be any easy route to accreditation.”
On the issue of needing to be chartered members, Hazel said: “We know a number of our members who aren’t chartered are concerned, but I would say that they really need to take advice about their future progression. Even though they may have years of experience, this hasn’t been assessed in a formal way.”
Hazel revealed that the scheme will go live “in principle” on 31 January 2011, when consultants who are eligible to join can sign up. The register will be available for public search four weeks later.
The cost of joining the scheme has been another area of concern, and Hazel confirmed that the registration fee will be just £30 during the first four weeks of operation, and £60 thereafter."
To read the full article on SHP Online, click here
Posted at 10:27 AM in Health & Safety Staff, Useful information | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: cieh, cmiosh, health & safety, hse, iirsm, iosh, shp
There was a bit of a fuss in certain newspapers this week over the refusal of a supermarket worker to sell christmas crackers to the mother of a 6 year old girl, ostensibly because of health & safety regulations. Surprise surprise, the shop worker was wrong, there are no such rules. According to Neil Morton, Chief Inspector of Explosives at the HSE,
"The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has not imposed any restrictions on the sale of Christmas crackers to children, as your article (8 November) claims.
HSE's responsibilities are focused on workplace risks associated with activities such as the serious business of manufacturing and storing significant quantities of explosives and fireworks.
The sale of Christmas crackers is a different matter and not the responsibility of HSE.
Yours sincerely,
Neil Morton
Chief Inspector of Explosives
Health and Safety Executive"
When will retailers start making sure their staff are properly informed about HSE regs, and not just let them go around undermining the true reason the Health & Safety regulations exist - to protect people, not stop them living their lives!!
Posted at 03:09 PM in Business, Health & Safety Staff, Jobs in Health & Safety, Recruitment, Useful information | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
There was a bit of a fuss in certain newspapers this week over the refusal of a supermarket worker to sell christmas crackers to the mother of a 6 year old girl, ostensibly because of health & safety regulations. Surprise surprise, the shop worker was wrong, there are no such rules. According to Neil Morton, Chief Inspector of Explosives at the HSE,
"The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has not imposed any restrictions on the sale of Christmas crackers to children, as your article (8 November) claims.
HSE's responsibilities are focused on workplace risks associated with activities such as the serious business of manufacturing and storing significant quantities of explosives and fireworks.
The sale of Christmas crackers is a different matter and not the responsibility of HSE.
Yours sincerely,
Neil Morton
Chief Inspector of Explosives
Health and Safety Executive"
When will retailers start making sure their staff are properly informed about HSE regs, and not just let them go around undermining the true reason the Health & Safety regulations exist - to protect people, not stop them living their lives!!
Posted at 03:09 PM in Business, Health & Safety Staff, Jobs in Health & Safety, Recruitment, Useful information | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
According to some research in the Recruiter magazine today,
"Just 66% of HR directors think engineers have the necessary skills and attributes to make a valuable contribution on a board of management.
According to research carried out by Sainsbury’s Management Fellows (SMF), a not-for-profit organisation that helps UK engineers gain knowledge and skills to make the transition from a technical to a senior management role, the backgrounds most prized in the boardroom are accountancy, sales, marketing, HR and legal, with professional engineering coming way down the scale.
However, when asked if professional engineers with MBAs are suitably qualified for board positions, 80% of the HR directors agreed that they are.
The survey also shows 86% of those asked were open minded about recruiting directors with non-financial or legal backgrounds and where engineers have MBA qualifications and business experience, 80% of HR directors thought that engineers had the necessary skills to warrant a place in the boardroom."
Interesting concept this, does anyone have any comments?
Posted at 03:50 PM in Business, Health & Safety Staff, Jobs in Health & Safety, Recruitment, Useful information | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: careers, employment, engineering, engineers, health & Safety, hr, hse, jobs, recruitment
Open letter to Lord Young from those who bear the real burden of too little health and safety: deregulation is dead in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, don't risk workers lives in a business-led ideological review.
Lord Young admitted yesterday (Health and safety law has noble origins- so what went wrong? David Young 23rd June) that he now realises some of the problems he cites on health safety are more to do with perception than reality, as he quotes example after example which, even if they are true, have nothing at all to do with workplace safety, or with the Health and Safety at Work Act or any of the other safety regulations emanating from the EU. We can only hope that now he will now proceed logically and stop looking to slash and burn health and safety laws when they are not the problem.
In the cases quoted, health and safety was used either as a lazy excuse, or was a complete misunderstanding of risk assessment, or were about a fear of being sued. We should say rubbish to the silly examples, but not be gullible enough to believe the clearly apocryphal ones about conkers and crash helmets.
Lord Young also said that since he started this review, he had not received one letter which disagreed with his preconceived view that health and safety has gone too far. This is hardly the hallmark of a balanced review. He and his team should be aware of the many articles and much evidence from trade unions, the TUC, Hazards magazine, the Hazards Campaign and also from us, Families Against Corporate Killers, the real victims of a workplace culture of too little health and safety not too much.
We are alarmed at Lord Young moving down the unjust path of castigating emergency service workers as standing by and letting children or others die due to health and safety. Suggesting emergency workers should be exempt from health and safety is counting their lives worth less than other workers. The truth is always more complicated that the tabloid soundbite, and involves training, equipment and proper risk assessments as two examples illustrate. In Greater Manchester, fire fighter Paul Metcalfe drowned in September 1999 while trying to rescue a teenage boy from a lake because of "a catalogue of failures" by his brigade, a court was told. He lacked the required safety equipment that he and his colleagues had repeatedly requested but risked his life anyway. Many firefighters have died in the course of doing the jobs over recent years. PC Ian Terry was killed in Manchester in June 2008, in a training exercise which was so free of even the most basic health and safety procedures, that the inquest returned a verdict of unlawful killing. We do not want exemptions that would risk the lives of more emergency workers.
Families Against Corporate Killers has written to Lord Young asking for a meeting as we are so concerned about his unbalanced views and that he only seem to consider the so-called ‘burdens on business’ rather than the burdens on workers and their families, and the very real burden of employers externalising their cost onto the whole of society. So in this open letter to Lord Young we try to provide a reality check.
Firstly, many more workers and members of the public are killed by in work-related incidents than the figures you quote which are the partial figures reported annually by the HSE. This number of those killed by work is too large but is only those which are reported to the HSE under RIDDOR, which excludes all workers killed on the roads, in the air and seas, members of the public, and workers committing suicide due to work pressures. More are killed by work-related activities than in what we call homicide every year. Many, many more are killed by occupational illnesses due to poor working conditions and hundreds of thousands more are made ill by work every year (‘The Whole Story’; ‘Job to Die for?’)
Almost all of these deaths, from incidents (not accidents) and illnesses would be prevented if employers merely complied with health and safety law, to give workers basic minimum standards at work. But they do not comply, and many employers are serial offenders, and some become serial killers, including household names like BP, Biffa, Corus, to name a few. Employers are breaking health and safety law, killing injuring and making workers ill, on a massive but mostly unreported scale. The disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is no surprise to those who know the history and corporate behaviour of BP, and many other companies. They have been getting away with it for too long. Unless he listens to other perspectives, Lord Young’s review threatens to swallow more red herrings thrown up by the business lobby, and end up covered in oil (The Bottom Line)
No-one watching the events in the Gulf can fail now to understand how one corporation’s avoidance of health and safety measures can be externalized onto the wider community, not forgetting, as often is, the 11 workers killed those injured and all their families heartbreak and life long suffering. It is vital that Lord Young understands the message – letting business lobby government for less regulation and less enforcement cost lives and money we can’t afford (BP). This government may say we are all in it together but we know that’s not true. Lord Young must also stop repeating the fact that health and safety regulation is spiralling out of control, when the fact is due to simplification and amalgamation, there is less regulation than there was 40 years ago and less than when he was last in government, charged with creating a bonfire of regulations in the 1980s!
Lord Young should also know that less than one in ten workers made ill, injured or killed receives any compensation, either state benefits or civil damages. The facts tend to get in the way of a good ‘compo culture scroungers’ story. Lord Young may choose to believe that business bears a hellish burden from complying (or not as we have seen above) with health and safety law, but the facts do not support him. (A little bit of compensation). In fact good health and safety saves business money, but poor health and safety costs not only workers and their families, it also cost all of us. Employers create 100% of the risks that hurt workers but they pay less than a quarter of the vast up to £30 billion cost, each year, the families pay and then the state pays in benefits and health costs (Who pays? You do!). We cannot afford the heart break, in these deficit reduction days we cannot afford the economic costs. Stronger law and tighter regulation would save us all £billions each year.
It is also untrue that there is an army of ‘nazi health and safety inspectors’. All forms of enforcement action have dropped off a cliff in recent years. Only 1 in 13 major and fatal injuries is even investigated, and in 98 % of major injury cases there is no enforcement action taken against the employer at all: not an improvement notice, not a prohibition notice and not a prosecution (The state we’re in). And the chance of an employer being caught not complying, which the HSE accepts is the cause of about 80% of all injuries and illness, is now down to a chance inspection once is 38 years (Once in a lifetime).
Lord Young asks, in other article, who has seen a dangerous office? Well those office workers at Stockline blown up in an explosion and injured, and the families of those killed for a start. And many of us work in unhealthy offices which may not kill, but can certainly make us very sick indeed. Musculo-skeletal disorders and stress illnesses caused by excessive work demands, cause the most time of work and are rife in offices. Many deaths occur in workplace which would be deemed low risk and allowed exemption from inspection under Tory plans which mirror the models that brought us Enron, Madoff and the credit crunch. But as we have seen above, there is far too little inspection of workplaces to even begin to establish which might be truly low risk or not.
Many families of people who were killed just for going to work, also once believed the fantasy Lord Young still adheres to: that H&S in the UK is fantastic, very strict, that laws are strong, even over the top, and they are rigorously, even zealously enforced. In fact as we learnt after the avoidable incident that took a life and changed out lives for good, employers are frequently completely ignorant of the law, feel under no great pressure to comply and that the enforcement authorities do not appear to use their powers preventively or very forcefully, are under-funded, under-supported and undermined by the ‘elf and safety gorn mad’ mantra preached by the media and, sadly, parroted by Lord Young and others.
When employers kill, often through gross negligence they may face no legal consequences for their actions, and even if prosecuted only face fines which are often paltry. Directors and managers who make the decisions that lead to deaths and injuries, are less legally accountable than a teenage hoodie on your street. For example the actions of the BP board in London, under Lord Browne were criticised extensively by official US reports as leading to the Texas City refinery explosion which killed 15 and injured many more. Not only were none of the directors, including Lord Browne, held accountable in court, he is now in charge of overseeing government department spending.
Families Against Corporate Killers urge Lord Young not to be taken in by many of the false stories he is being fed, and to seek out the real facts, to hear our stories and many others which show how employers are getting away with widespread criminality from lack of compliance up to gross negligence. We are concerned at the lack of balance and preconception in this review. As we all reel from the economic disaster caused by deregulation, light touch regulation and letting the financial business sector regulate itself, we say to Lord Young and the coalition government: deregulation of health and safety is dead in the oil polluted water of the Gulf of Mexico, gone up in the smoke of Stockline and Buncefield, it is deader than the famous dead parrot. Health and safety law and its enforcement is not mere red tape but a vital life-line, needed even more so now when we will need all our strength and health to survive the terrible cuts inflicted on us to pay off the deficit. Don't cut H&S and condemn us to even less safe, even less healthy workplaces, by following a failed business led ideology.
Hilda Palmer
On Behalf of FACK
Posted at 12:05 PM in Business, Health & Safety Staff, Jobs in Health & Safety, Recruitment, Useful information, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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