Rub out the risk

Designers have no idea about how to design for safe construction and maintenance. The result is a higher chance of accidents.

And those employing designers, who should by law have made sure they are competent in health and safety, are not doing so.

Help is at hand. A health and safety prequalification standard introduced in October provides a way for clients and contractors to ensure that the designers they employ are up to speed with health and safety.

Under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations (CDM) 1994 designers have a responsibility to eliminate risks where possible. But an HSE survey of designers carried out last year found that only 24% could show an example of where they had removed risk at the design stage.

How do you know a designer is competent? Well, one way is to include safety questions at the prequalification stage. This has become commonplace for contractors, but not for designers. On all but the biggest of projects, they are selected for their experience on similar jobs, or with similar clients.

So there’s a chance for this standard to become an industry standard. “If large groups of procuring organisations buy into it, they will all be asking for the same thing every time. Joint recognition. That’s the holy grail,” says Andy Sneddon, health and safety director of the Construction Confederation, one of the bodies which has developed the standard.

This will avoid the situation contractors face, where every procurer has a different set of criteria. It’s a bureaucratic mess, says Sneddon. Managing risk has become a paper-pushing exercise which keeps the businessmen happy because it produces an auditable trail. The problem is that this can bear little resemblance to what happens in real life.

The new standard aims to encourage prequalification with a difference, though. It puts the emphasis on trust and communication rather than on piles of paperwork. Designers will be asked for a modest amount of written evidence under five areas: experience; health and safety knowledge; technical professional knowledge; managing design hazards; and subcontracting designing responsibilities.

A two-page summary is called for, rather than sections of manuals or examples of proformas photocopied en masse.

Face-to-face assessment

the new standard puts the emphasis on trust and communication rather than piles of paperwork

The procurer should then follow up with an interview. The standard lists questions that designers could face during an interview in order to corroborate the information they have provided. For example ‘How do you communicate H&S information including residual risk?’

The procuring organisation can also follow up the short submission by asking for further evidence to be provided and the designer has to agree to be audited. The standard sets down what evidence will be required – and what won’t. So for example to prove staff have been trained in health and safety, provide details of the training provided, but not all the training material and content of the courses.

It’s important, says Sneddon, to make sure that a design firm fits culturally with those employing it, since designers are involved long after work has started on site and there needs to be good communication between them and the constructors.

So what will all this mean for designers? In short, a lot of hard work and training. At the moment designers tend to produce reams of generic risk assessments, effectively transferring under-construction risks to the contractors.

In order to work out the impact of their designs, they need to learn about how things are done on site. For example, you need to think about things like access. What sort of scaffolding might be needed? What are the risks with that? How could you change the design to eliminate those risks? What new risks might it throw up?

If the standard prompts designers to start thinking more carefully about how they manage design risks, it will be a good thing. But its success depends on its widespread uptake among the industry. Several bodies and firms were involved in its creation including the Construction Confederation, Construction Industry Council, the Contractors Health and Safety Scheme (CHAS) and National Britannia which operates SafeContractor.

CHAS and SafeContractor, which between them serve many local authorities, will use the standard and have even started to talk about cross-recognition of designers on health and safety prequalification. But what about contractors?

The Major Contractors Group attempted a similar exercise for safety prequalification of subcontractors. After a lot of discussion (everybody thought their version was the best, says Sneddon) they came out with a set of criteria, which provided a starting point for the designers’ standard. But Sneddon says the MCG members haven’t adopted it, preferring their own established ways.

The difference with the designers’ version is that there aren’t many established systems. But the culture of requesting heaps of documentation does exist. And it will take more than a new standard to change that.