Henrys cat:
Rjan:
If they were fined, that suggests more than an accident. So I looked the article up that you linked, and sure enough:
“failed to implement a safe system of work which resulted in the frequent misuse of trailer parking brakes by drivers on site”
They weren’t fined merely because they didn’t have a written policy on handbrakes - as if such a thing is even necessary. They were fined because they weren’t doing anything to tackle the issue about how trailers were being routinely dropped without their brakes being applied.
We’ve all left a handbrake off now and again. Nowadays, the alarm in the cab sounds - that’s one safety feature. Another safety feature is that the trailer has its brake on. A third is that the yard is built level. One oversight should never be enough to cause calamity, that’s why this company was fined
I bet they have one now though, plus numerous others which we would all think were just common sense.
The firm I work for issue me with 3 folders of risk assessments for everything we do, this is along with having to sign a SSOW pack and task brief each shift after being briefed on them by the relevant person in charge. We regularly work in close proximity to live power lines with cranes and mewps so are all well aware of the risks.
Once again more H&S bull will have to be produced to cover lack of basic common sense.
In other words, the key here is not the paperwork, it’s the fact that on every single site where that risk is present, a man takes you by the hand every single morning, points to the thing, and says “LOOK!”. And that’s on top of the rest of your training and experience.
The thing is lots of companies focus on paperwork, especially signed paperwork as if they’re drafting a legal agreement, when it’s not about whether you have signed paperwork.
True, courts expect companies generally to have business records, because they don’t much believe that anyone is capable of keeping everything in their head - and when, following an accident, it turns out no records exist, courts make the appropriate inferences.
Even I tend to write down the steps of any process where compliance is critical - although of course as an experienced man I’m not usually fumbling with notes just to drop a trailer, but I’m recounting the steps in my head. But for any process that requires more than about 7 distinct steps to be counted, I’d probably need a written memo - and if it’s not always obvious where I’m up to or it’s possible to lose track, then I’d use a checklist.
For obvious reasons, in a practical job where you need to use your hands, it’s easy to become overwhelmed if you’re being expected to use pen and paper to ensure your reliability - and not things built into the equipment, like interlocks, or abacus-like devices which (like the pen and paper, but without having to be carried) you are trained to manipulate as you work to allow you to keep track of where you are.
When we’re talking about critical processes, where one oversight leads to serious calamity, this is how you’ve got to approach it - and bosses who devise such processes as a way to manage a hazard, have to make sure that workers are trained and both physically and mentally rehearsed in following them (it’s not enough just to tell someone or give them a written instruction, if death is one misstep away), that they have the memory and compliance aids which support the process and prevent oversights, and that they are being supported and monitored to ensure that the process is being followed and the training complied with.
When accidents do happen, it is almost invariably the case that bosses have done none of these things. It’s easy to say “you look upwards before you raise the tipper”, but if it has to happen every single time without fail in order to avoid death, then you start needing to train people in using checklists and following a site assessment procedure every time they want to raise the bloody thing. It’s far easier and more workable in the long run to just restrict people to tipping on familiar dedicated sites that have already been engineered and vetted to be inherently safe in respect of the hazard which “looking upwards” is designed to address.
In the meantime, the courts will say that if you haven’t gone through all that palava to have avoided the accident which caused death or injury, then you haven’t done what is reasonably practicable to avoid it - because when human life and limb is involved, almost anything that prevents it, no matter how costly or complex, is considered reasonably practicable. Bosses almost never get away (as they see it) with industrial accidents, because the fact of the accident happening and not having been prevented is (except for suicide) invariably a sign that not enough was done to prevent it. They don’t seem to see that oversights by workers are not an excuse - it is oversights which bosses have the responsibility to prevent turning into serious industrial accidents.
, thank God for Freight Dog who seems to have picked it up lately. My only fear is that FD is a normal human and soon will lose the will to live when faced with a constant barrage of CF speak and will merely scroll straight past like the rest of us do. 
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