Over 2,800 people have died in the last 25 years from injuries they received as a result of construction work, with many more injured or made ill. Construction inspectors face a daily battle to help bring those numbers down. Michelle Barratt hears how safety inspectors tackle those risks.

ANNA BLISS, Health and Safety Executive (HSE) principal inspector for construction in Greater Manchester, started her career with the executive 15 years ago in Birmingham as a general inspector. Her role as principal inspector, which she has held for two years, sees her heading a team of six inspectors across Greater Manchester. “It’s a really good area to be inspecting in,” says Bliss, “especially with so much construction work going on. We get a whole range of buildings in this area, from very tall buildings to refurbishing old Victorian houses so we’re kept
very busy.”

Bliss says the HSE has a proactive plan of what work they want to do in terms of going out and inspecting the sites, which is prioritised on the basis of the accidents that have happened within the industry. “Next year one of the areas we will be concentrating on is refurbishment, and commercial refurbishment,” she says. “Whether it’s a derelict mill or an old Victorian house being turned into flats and apartments. We need to start planning what we are going to look at because there have been problems across Greater Manchester and throughout the UK with buildings collapsing.”

Bliss says construction accidents are a particular problem with developers converting Victorian mansions into flats. “If interior walls aren’t removed correctly for example, then you can end up with a full building collapsing, which can potentially kill whoever is in the building,” she says. “It’s been fortunate that we haven’t had any accidents with multiple people being killed in those circumstances.”

Throughout the UK, buildings are being constructed at greater and greater heights, which can be a problem for health and safety. But Bliss says that the absolute height of the building very often doesn’t make a difference once you’re over one or two storeys. “If you fall off the outside of a building, you fall off the outside of a building,” she says.

“Whatever the height of the building you want to stop that.”

Bliss says that that there are particular issues with tall buildings in the method of constructing concrete frame buildings and the way flying tables are used to build the floors. “What you’ll find in the future is that buildings will be constructed in a different way,” she says. “The industry has recognised that they have a problem and they want to do it differently. The HSE has worked with contractors on this so in the future you’ll see buildings with an ‘extra skin’ around the top of them, which acts to stop objects and people from falling out of the building.”

The HSE also worked with the industry on the way it uses harnesses for those working at the edge of a building. “We were finding that people were using the equipment that was available, but they were attaching it so it wouldn’t necessarily work,” says Bliss. In order for a lanyard to work the rope usually needs to go above a persons head and not at more than 30° away from the vertical. “In some of these buildings, particularly residential buildings, the floor-to-ceiling height can be just over 2m so to attach a rope above somebody’s head can be awkward,” she says.

“People were attaching them to a running line some way behind them so they were walking out horizontally. They feel safe because they are on a lanyard but if they stepped off the edge of the building it could just carry on extending.”

Bliss says the contractors are now taking completely different approaches to techniques such as installing cladding, after working with the HSE. “Quite a few companies that install cladding will use the robotic machines, which effectively are mini cranes,” she says. “The cranes work inside the building and will pick up the cladding from where its being stored, position it the right way round and take it outside the building,” Bliss explains. “People only have to approach that once the cladding is held in place by the machine, whereas before you may have needed two or three people on the edge of the building but now you don’t.”

The HSE’s priorities for next year are refurbishment, drilling and piling and falls from vehicles. But with two  serious incidents involving the collapse of cranes in the last four months, this is an area with which they are
growing increasingly concerned.

“We’ve had two incidents now, one in Battersea and one in Liverpool, where a crane has collapsed or fallen apart during operation,” Bliss says. “In neither incident have we come to a conclusion as to the cause of it, but what we did find was that both cranes were being erected by a group supplied by Falcon. They were carrying out the thorough examination themselves to say it has been erected correctly and it is OK to use.”

Bliss says the crane collapse has caused the HSE sufficient concern to issue a prohibition notice against Falcon Crane Hire to use of any of their cranes that had not been examined by an independent consultant. “It needs to be thoroughly examined by a competent person, which is always going to be difficult to define,” she says.  "Effectively, what you’re  talking about is somebody who has sufficient technical training but also sufficient experience to be competent in the role that they are carrying out. I don’t think there is any suggestion that the  people who erected these cranes were necessarily incompetent in the job they were doing, it’s whether or not they had the confidence to know how to inspect the cranes.”

Bliss says Falcon has accepted the HSE’s recommendations and has come up with a programme for inspection. “There are all sorts of factors that could affect something going wrong with a crane,” she says. “But its already a piece of equipment for which there are a lot of rules and regulations about how you should and shouldn’t operate it, and at the moment we feel that they are valid and that if people follow them there shouldn’t be an incident.
We have to look at what happened in these cases and ask: ‘Do we need to visit those rules again?’”

As well as regular site visits the HSE spread the health and safety word at various events. “We run an event every year at Haydock Park and our website also has lots of free information,” says Bliss. “I know there are people out there who aren’t aware of what they need to do, but also, it’s not that hard to get hold of information. My impression of the industry is that the vast majority of people intend to get it right. My view very often is that  when we come to look at accidents we can conclude that most of them are preventable and if people had taken a bit more time and thought about it in terms of risk, there wouldn’t be a problem.”