Health and safety latest

Laing O’Rourke said it will begin testing all staff and subcontractors for drug and alcohol use in a bid to increase site safety.

Announcing the news, the firm’s health and safety director John Green said the testing regime will be phased in as part of O’Rourke’s Injury and Accident Free Initiative. ‘The use of tests demonstrates that the person working for you is unlikely to do anything stupid because they are under the influence of either drugs or alcohol,’ Construction News (CN) quoted him as saying.

Initially, anyone new to a Laing O’Rourke site can expect to be tested at some point within the first three months and anyone failing the test will be asked to leave the site, said Green.

The news came as the construction industry death toll hit 50 since last April after a builder was killed falling from scaffolding on a Carillion site in Wales.

The unnamed man, thought to be working for a subcontractor, was killed while working on the Ferrara Quay housing development in Swansea. He was taken to hospital but later died, Contract Journal (CJ) reported.

The tragedy brings the provisional number of construction workers killed in 2007/2008 to 50, compared with 77 the previous year, said CJ.

More workers lives could be put at risk by a reported government turf war over responsibility for health and safety policy.

Workers union UCATT fears that the Department for Business Employment and Regulatory Reform (BERR) wants to take over safety policy-making from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), CJ reported. BERR, claims UCATT, is an entirely pro-business operation.

A major public enquiry into the Health & Safety Executive has been launched by the House of Commons select committee, which monitors the work of the DWP. ‘An inter-departmental turf war over who controls health and safety policy and other key regulators must not develop,’ said Alan Ritchie, UCATT general secretary. ‘The real priority must be to ensure that spending cuts are reversed and that the HSE has sufficient resources to perform all its tasks adequately,’ he told CJ.