Last month Construction Manager launched a campaign to cut site accidents. The idea is to post safety boards outside every site in Britain that tell the public how many days since the last accident. Will it work?
On 17 November, the Health & Safety Executive confirmed Construction Manager's November issues prediction that site deaths are escalating alarmingly. Be-tween April and September this year 62 workers died on site. This compares to 39 for the same period in 1999.

Contractors wrung their hands - again. The president of the Construction Confederation, John Gains, said that the statistic was too high and figures are rising unsatisfactorily.

Kick up the backside
But, just a week later, the Major Contractors Group – the trade body that represents the biggest contractors – warned that there shouldn't be a "knee jerk reaction" to the statistics.

Despite the warning from Clarke, Construction Manager continued with its campaign to cut site deaths. Our idea, backed by dozens of industry leaders including Her Majesty's chief inspector of construction Kevin Myers, is that every site in Britain should display a board on its hoarding that tells passers by and workers coming on to site how many days have passed since the last accident.

The theory is the majority of sites are safe and relatively free of accidents. Large numbers of "days since the last accident" will be racked up and the public will be impressed. They will start to believe construction is safer than they thought.

For workers, the stigma of being the one who turns the clock back to zero should be a stimulus for model safety behaviour.

Construction Manager made a full-size sign to test the idea. Laing Homes agreed to let us test the sign outside one of its sites in north London.

Although there had not been an accident on the 60-plot site, for the sake of the test we filled in the figure of 30 days since the last accident – purely to test the idea out.

Reactions
Reactions were positive. Pat Whelan, the owner of groundwork contractor Whelan which is preparing the site, said the board was a good idea. "Anything that improves attitudes has got to be a good idea. There are too many accidents on sites," he said.

Duncan Tait, a site operative with Laing Homes, also backed the board. "It will make people think. And that's got to be worth backing."

Tariq Khalil, a geotechnical engineer with Laing Technology Group, had reservations about the idea. "Having a figure on the board implies that there has been an accident. There hasn't been an accident here," he said. "Perhaps you need to change the wording," he added.

BAA has a solution to the problem. It imposes a stringent safety culture on its construction industry suppliers. This includes a board being displayed outside each site detailing the accident frequency ratio. This means displaying how many accidents on that site divided by the numbers of hours worked.

The airport operator is driving for a one in a million accident-to-time-worked ratio. So far it has achieved one in 250,000, the company says. But, it adds, the figure is improving all the time.

One site worker thought that the safety board would not improve safety. "All it will do is stop people from reporting accidents. Then no-one will know what the real situation is like out on sites," he said.

Passers-by liked the idea. William Rees, a retired schoolteacher from Borehamwood, said that he was surprised that there aren't accidents on site every day. "I thought you couldn't go on site for people injuring themselves. It's a bit of an eye-opener

Source

Construction Manager