The Association wants to shake up the HSE’s handling of accident reporting to make it easier for contractors and to achieve more credible national statistics.

The ECA has called for a major simplification of the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrence Regulations (RIDDOR). In particular, the Association wants to abolish the RIDDOR requirement for employers to report occupational diseases or illnesses, as well as seeing much simpler reporting of dangerous occurrences.

Under RIDDOR, various work-related accidents, diseases and dangerous occurrences must be reported. But the ECA believes that the regulations are trying to serve too many functions – these include guiding enforcement action, collating national statistics and accident types, and examining instances of occupational disease and serious near misses at work.

It believes that information on diseases and illnesses could be better collated by other means such as the Labour Force Survey, reports from GPs or even voluntarily by trade associations. The ECA suggests that since employers do not diagnose diseases a medically trained person should be responsible for reporting these illnesses, as long as the illness has clear symptoms linked to an occupational disease.

Paul Reeve, ECA health and safety advisor, says: “Our message to the Health and Safety Executive on RIDDOR is to make it very simple. Unfortunately, it isn’t at the moment. HSE’s national safety figures will be far more credible if they make a RIDDOR report as easy as possible.”

The ECA uses RIDDOR reportable data when compiling its annual industry accident statistics for the JIB. Figures have drastically improved since the ZAP initiative was introduced in 2001.

Source

Electrical and Mechanical Contractor