There are two problems. One is that health and safety is a business in itself. As far as people who work in it are concerned, the more requirements, the merrier. The second is one of degree. No sooner has the construction industry been brought up to one standard than the professionals in the safety business have to either push for higher standards or start looking for another job.
I recently handed over a 50-bed rough sleepers' hostel in King's Cross. This two-year project had involved carrying out about £200 000 worth of refurbishment to a large Victorian school. Not unreasonably, this work included the installation of an early warning fire alarm system. We had to have the hostel open on the fifth of the month in order not to suffer a funding penalty. The fire alarm had to be tested before the beds could be occupied, but the local authority could not do so until the 16th.
My client retains an in-house health and safety consultant who tested the system for us on the fourth. The local authority still had to test the installation. Fair enough. They activated the smoke detector and there was a piercing blast, 15 seconds of which was enough to wake the dead. However, the inspectors insisted on checking the decibel reading at every single bedhead, which took about three-quarters of an hour.
Now, this is a fully staffed hostel and residents would be physically rolled out of bed by the management if there was the merest whiff of a fire. Thirty seconds of the alarm causes physical pain in the head, so you can imagine the effect of protracted exposure to this racket on the residents, not to mention on the harassed staff who have to reassure them. You can see the inspector's point, but what did 45 minutes of excruciating discomfort actually achieve? The total number of people who died in building fires in 1997 was 598, and only 32 of those were not in private dwellings, so it's not exactly an epidemic. Yet how long will it be before two-storey houses have to have half-hour fire doors, intumescent strips and the rest? In terms of lives lost, a Hillsborough-a-day are still killed on the roads and an estimated 17 000 die prematurely as a result of car-generated air pollution, but construction is still an easier target.
No sooner has construction been brought up to one standard than the safety professionals have to either push for higher standards or start looking for another job
It never ceases to amaze me that you can wait for a cross-Channel ferry in a building type most people are familiar with, one in which any change in level is scrupulously guarded with railings at no more than 100 mm centres, and which has all the handrails at the correct height and so on. From the terminal, you step on to a ferry, which may be an environment you have never been in before, and which soon enough may be pitching and tossing in a howling gale at sea. Yet in these far more perilous circumstances, the only barrier deemed necessary between the ship's handrail and the sea churning away 20 m below is a single piece of 9 mm diameter flexible cable with a gap below big enough for Giant Haystacks to roll through.
The cost of meeting the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations is now an accepted part of the commissioning client's expenditure, and the people who enforce them are constantly striving to expand their role and justify their existence.
If the desired objective is a safer construction industry, the money would be far better spent funding a large number of additional people to monitor work on site, and buildings in use. However, those people who are already developing the safety business have an interest in seeing that the Health and Safety Executive demands more and more paperwork, and that people pay them to provide it. Like any other form of safety, the demands will just grow and grow.
