Despite the increase in construction activity, there has been a 17% reduction in the number of accidents on site, according to the records of a leading safety consultancy.
The Building Safety Group says that its records show the number of accidents in the three months from 1st November until the 31st January was down 17% on the previous quarter and down 10% compared to the same period a year before.
Building Safety Group managing director Paul Kimpton put the results down to the HSE’s Fee for Intervention scheme motivating its customers to tighten up.
He said: “While we disagree with any money making motives behind the HSE’s Fee for Intervention, it has necessarily increased the need for more frequent site inspections and for those inspections to be more rigorous, and it is clear that amongst our membership these inspections are now having a positive effect in reducing the number of avoidable accidents.”
Last month an official independent review of the Health & Safety Executive’s role and activities for the government recommended that the controversial Fee for Intervention scheme, introduced in Otober 2012, should be scrapped or at least significantly reformed. (See previous report here.)
The Building Safety Group said that out of the 200,000 construction workers on its customers’ sites, the biggest drop was in the category of workers being hit by something fixed or stationary. Here the number of accidents more than halved, quarter-on-quarter, from 31 to 14.
There was a 25% fall in injuries sustained by moving, flying or falling objects, down from 41 to 31 injuries.
There was a 20% drop in the number of people injured while handling, lifting or carrying something, which remains construction’s most common cause of injury this quarter, with 35 of the 20,000 workers getting injured this way in the last three months, and 81 over the past year.
The drop in accidents occurred across almost every category, except falls from height and the miscellaneous category of ‘dangerous occurrence’.
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