Employer's obligations for safety

Duties of care

Evolving in the civil courts, the employer's duty of care to each of his employees can conveniently be considered under five headings. These require that an employer must provide:

• Safe systems of work.
• A safe place of work.
• Plant and machinery that is safe to use.
• Competent supervision and/or suitable training.
• Care in the selection of fellow employees.

These common law duties are now incorporated into statutory law under s. 2(2) of HSW which has extended the employer's obligations to the provision of training, instruction and information in sufficient detail to enable the employee to understand the hazards faced and be familiar with the techniques for avoiding them.

These obligations have been further extended by the requirements of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1992 (MHSWR) under which employers must carry out assessments of all operations and processes that present a potential risk to the health and safety of employees. Additionally, they must include working procedures and proper organisation to meet health and safety responsibilities and ensure that they have available to them adequate and competent assistance on health and safety matters.

Use, handling and storage

HSW requires the employer to make arrangements for the safe use, handling and storage of substances and equipment. The Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992 (MHOPR) advocated the elimination of manual handling, but where this cannot be achieved requires the risks from handling to be assessed and precautionary measures taken to prevent injury.

The detailed requirements for the use, handling and storage of certain substances are contained in the relevant regulations such as the control of Lead at Work Regulations 4, HFL and COSHH. Safe storage of substances relates not only to the physical arrangements such as racking etc., but also to possible chemical reactions between adjacently stored incompatible substances. A number of serious warehouse fires reinforce this point.

The supply of machinery (Safety) Regulations 1992 (Machinery Regulations) lays down that new plant and equipment must be designed so that it is stable when in use and being moved, or arrangements made to ensure it sill be stable. Adequate and suitable handling equipment must be provided to enable plant and equipment to be moved safely.

Transport

The transport of substances, whether within the factory premises or on the public highway, must be in a safe manner with the container of the substance labelled to identify its contents. - for certain hazardous substances the label should carry standard warning signs. The duties of the employer, as consignor or employer of the driver, are much more onerous and once the load leaves the factory premises and goes on the public highway. Very strict requirements are imposed by road traffic laws and, in the case of certain chemicals, by Regulations supported by an Approved code of Practice. If an accident occurs the HSW is likely to be invoked only if the driver (an employee in the course of his employment) is injured or the substances are not properly labelled. Any other enforcement action would be taken by the police under the road traffic or highways laws but could involve the employer as owner of the vehicle.

Safe access and egress

The occupier or employer should provide safe means of access to and egress from all the places where employees and others have need to resort to in the course of their work. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 (WHSWR), which apply to all new or modified workplaces, and will apply to all workplaces from 1996, place general duties on the employer or occupier in that respect. These regulations are more specific than earlier legislation regarding the condition of access routes and the organisation of traffic routes.

Environment

The environment of the workplace must be such that it does not put the health of the workpeople at risk. WHSWR lays down the requirements to be met within the workplace and covers such conditions as keeping the workplace clean, properly decorated, ventilated, well lit, suitably heated and that adequate welfare facilities such as first aid, toilets, washrooms, changing and rest rooms are provided.

Noxious fumes must not be emitted into the atmosphere and the disposal of waste, particularly waste containing dangerous chemicals, is strictly controlled by regulations.

Safety policy

One of the major recommendations of the Robens Report was that all employers should develop and publish a statement setting out their intentions with regard to protecting the health and safety of their employees. This is now enshrined in s. 2(3) of the HSW and all employers, except those employing less than five persons, are required to have a written statement of their safety policy. However, in preparing this statement of safety policy sight should not be lost of the prime aim of the company which is to make a profit through the manufacture and sale of the products it makes or the service it provides to its clients. The safety policy should state that the intention is to do so without putting employees, or others, at risk of their health of physical well being.

Copies of the policy should be 'brought to the notice of employees' either by displaying it on notice boards if this is the normally accepted means of general communication, or by giving a copy to each employee. For new starts, their induction training should include discussion of the company's safety policy when copies can be issued to them.

Supporting the policy should be information on the organisation that exists to implement the policy and the facilities or arrangements that are in being or achieving the policy's intent. These two points are dealt with below.

The fact of drawing up a safety policy document is not sufficient to ensure that the company will be a safe place to work or that the employees will not suffer injury. The successful implementation of the policy depends to a large extent for its success on the degree of the employer's commitment and involvement of the employer the policy is not likely to be effective.

Organisation

For an organisation to be effective it must have some sort of structure or framework into which the functions and functionaries who make up that organisation fit. However, this is not sufficient to ensure that the organisation will work and it rests with the manager to provide the motivation and to ensure its continued smooth running. His role extends to co-ordinating the various activities so that they work as a team and all contribute towards the success of the enterprise.

He must prepare the plan of action, allocate jobs and determine what roles and functions each of the members is required to fulfil. The functions are shown on the diagram as mechanistic parts of an organisation and these can be expanded by written explanations or job descriptions. What is not so easily defined are the actual roles each individual plays since these can extend beyond the bald function as outlined. For example, functionally, the supervisor is responsible for allocating work, ensuring that the materials are available and that the required numbers of the product are produced as the right time. However, his role is considerably more complex. He has to deal with the inter-personal problems that arise; handle technical queries to do with materials that have been supplied, ensure that the safety rules are followed and cope with the effects of absenteeism on production targets.

Each individual in the organisation is faced with informal or fringe problems not directly associated with the main thrust of his job, but problems that are inevitably part of the job. It is part of the manager's responsibility to ensure that each part of the organisation he sets up is capable of meeting he demands put on it in its efforts to achieve the company's operational goals.

Into this organisation must be fitted the health and safety role, whether full-time appointment, part-time or split responsibility or as a hired-in service. Whichever arrangement is employed, the person or body providing the advice must be competent in health and safety matters - this is a requirement of MHSWR.

Arrangements

Attached to the safety policy document should be a note that outlines the arrangements that exist within the company for carrying forward its efforts to develop and maintain high levels of health and safety. Included in this note could be reference to any rules that relate to health and safety matters. Typical of the arrangements described in the notes could be:

• The role and function of the safety committee.
• Recognition of safety representatives.
• The need for personal involvement.
• Existing safety standards and rules.
• The issue and use of protective clothing.
• Control of contractors and visitors.
• Safety in use of fork lift trucks.
• Handling of chemicals.
• Noise and hearing protection.
• Testing and control of the environment.
• Permit to work and locking-off procedures.
• etc.

Risk assessments

Much of the success in achieving high standards of health and safety lies in removing or reducing the risks faced by employees before an accident happens. The value of this has been recognised and requirements are contained in legislation for employers to carry out risk assessments for all operations.

In many cases, risk assessments are carried out subjectively, almost subconsciously, in the normal course of work, and indeed living.

Risk is defined as a harmonised standard as a combination of severity, frequency and duration of exposure and of the probability of an event occurring. Putting a numerical value to the risk, using one of the methods outlined in an IOSH publication, enables priorities to be assigned to further investigative work for reducing the risk or providing protective measures.

MHSWR requires every employee to carry out risk assessments and, for those employing more than five people, to record the findings of the assessment. The degree of detail, recorded must be determined by the risk faced, but it can range from a simple statement of the date, location, hazard viewed, assessed level of risk and precautionary measures, if any, to be taken through to a detailed analysis of risk using the harmonised standard. Risk assessments should be reviewed and updated whenever changes occur to the work situation that make the earlier assessment unsound.

Monitoring safety performance

The key elements in achieving and maintaining high standards of health and safety are a commitment by management, effective training, systems of work that are safe, regular monitoring and a committed work-force. In manufacturing, regular checks on production performance enable a manager to assess whether he is likely to meet the goals that have been set and to identify those areas where there is slippage so that he can initiate corrective action. In much the same way, regular checks on safety matters can highlight problem areas and enable action to be taken before an accident occurs. These safety checks can be either reactive or proactive.

Reactive checks are those that are made post-incident in response to reports that highlight something that is not according to plan. The most common such checks in health and safety are the accident statistics used to ensure accident performance. These record failures (accidents) after they have occurred and, while they can give an indication of where corrective action needs to be taken, the price of an accident has already been paid. There is also delay between the incident, or series of incidents that have attracted attention, and the initiation of corrective action. Unless care is taken in the way in which an investigation into an accident is carried out, obvious causes, such as lack of guards etc. especially when there is the possibility of future litigation, can divert attention from the underlying, but no necessarily obvious, cause. Accident statistics are relatively easy to collect but have a limited role and must be seen as one of a number of techniques that can be employed in the identification, elimination and control of hazards.

The proactive approach, on the other hand, endeavours to identify, evaluate and control hazards and risks before they develop to the stage of causing an accident. The technique is inherent in the process of risk management. One of the more common methods employed to identify potential hazards before they manifest themselves is the safety inspection, or survey, carried out by the safety adviser, manager and safety representative, where the work area in inspected for any hazards which are noted. After the inspection the identified hazards are assessed and a plan of action to put them right is formulated. Variations on this theme include:

• Safety tours where a pre-agreed route is followed looking for all hazards,
• Safety sampling which involves inspecting the whole work area but looking only for particular types of hazard - i.e. the sample, and
• Safety audits which endeavour to obtain a numerical measure of the number of examples of each hazard found.

These techniques identify hazards before accidents occur and enable preventative measures to be taken. If the inspections or surveys are repeated on a regular basis and compared with earlier results, an indication of improving or worsening safety performances can be obtained without suffering the trauma of an accident.

Other schemes for the proactive assessment of safety performance include CHASE which concentrates on assessing the individual manager's awareness, attitudes, knowledge of health and safety matters on the premise that if the manager knows what is required he will ensure that is either provided or achieved. In another scheme, ISRS, trained assessors who look at a number of operating facets to determine management and operator safety performance and attitudes carry out the survey

Training

A key element in achieving and maintaining high levels of safety is knowledge of the hazards, their effects and the techniques to avoid or ameliorate those effects. With this knowledge comes the confidence to deal with the hazards but it is important that the knowledge acquired is relevant and is technically correct. Much harm can be done when using incorrect information in the misguided belief of its veracity. The responsibility for ensuring that the knowledge employees of all levels have about the hazards they may meet is correct and with a sound technical base lies with the employer. The provision of that knowledge through training, instruction and information constitutes a major contribution towards high safety performance.

In providing the training, account must be taken of the level of employee involved. At senior manager level with high qualifications, the information can be of a fairly technical nature whereas as operator level the information needs to be more basic related to the identification of the substance in terms meaningful to the operator, recognition of the hazard, its likely effect on an individual and the action necessary to avoid ill-effects. How, and to what degree, the training is given will depend on the local circumstances, practices, types of labour and seriousness of the hazard involved.

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