Health and safety regulations can sometimes seem like they were designed just to inconvenience people, rather than to save their lives. This impression isn't helped by the journalists who seem to take great pleasure in writing about absurd 'elf and safety' stories that make the whole practice look like a joke - trees being cut down for no good reason, people being ordered to remove their Christmas decorations, and so forth.
But, in spite of all this, health and safety is there for a crucial purpose: to keep people safe from harm. It isn't hard to quantify the importance of this; for every cringeworthy story about 'health and safety gone mad', there are half a dozen about somebody who was seriously injured or even killed by H&S oversights. If, for example, you were to Google height safety (something of a speciality for the SafetyLiftinGear team), you'd be rewarded with the following horror stories (all of which are from the last week or so):
- A man in Kettering punctured a lung and broke several bones after falling more than 13 feet from a recycling cabin onto a concrete floor. His employers were fined £9,000.
- A construction firm in Berkshire was recently fined £10,000 after a local resident photographed the firm's employees working on a roof without anything standing between them and a fall of almost 20 feet.
- Another £10,000 fine was handed out to a Cheshire-based homebuilder last week after a plasterer fell through an unguarded opening and fell nearly 10 feet to the floor below, cracking two vertebrae.
As you can see, poor health and safety practices really are everywhere, and it's high time for businesses like those mentioned above to sort it out.
For starters, then: if you or your employees are ever carrying out any work at height, ensure that the correct height safety equipment is in place. As we've seen, this could prevent some serious injuries, not to mention some major fines.
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