The competence question
June 1st 2007 Bureaucratic rubbish or a real opportunity to
strengthen safety cultures and practices?
Whatever your view, the Construction Design
Management (CDM) Regulations of 1994 were
introduced after several disastrous years for
construction fatalities, and today we are enjoying a
significant downward trend, says Dave Charlton,
technical director of 4See Risk Management
Like them or loath them, the CDM Regulations appear to
do what they say on the tin, and should see stakeholders
making another step change in their approach to health
and safety. But the Regulations have raised a few common
areas of concern.
The new emphasis on proving the competence of every
stakeholder including individual workers is one such area.
If a worker is not deemed competent then they have to be
supervised by someone who is, and a ratio for competent
to non-competent workers is not given. There is a possible
scenario of lots of workers having to work under
supervision because they can't prove their competence.
Specialist in refurbishing occupied housing in the public
sector, Bullock, employs 500 people on staff and a further
1500 contractors. It responded to the regulations with an
overhaul of its sub-contractor approval procedure. "We will
be much more rigorous than before in approving subcontractors;
some of our smaller contractors may struggle
with this, and we will help them where we can," explains
Sara Sutton, Bullock, H&S coordinator.
"We have changed health and safety and company
procedures such as those for welfare on site, and it has
created a great deal of work. The new legislation has also
made us look again at all of our documentation and
quality management systems," Sutton adds.
Sutton was responsible for building awareness of the
new regulations within her company, but not all
construction businesses will have a health and safety
professional on staff to ensure compliance.
A Tonbridge based company which designs and builds
100 homes a year had already established an initiative to
ensure that each of its 60 preferred sub contractors was
compliant and competent. Working with health and safety
consultancy, 4See Risk Management, Millwood Designer
Homes checked health and safety policies and training
records of each company, looking at accident records and
risk assessments. The work was done long before the CDM
regulations made it necessary, and to a much higher
standard than mandated.
Millwood Designer Homes acquires land and designs its
own homes. "We fulfil all the roles; we are client, designer
and principal contractor and so the regulations which
stress cooperation and coordination won't affect us much.
But for most of the industry it took years to get fully
familiar with the old regulations and now they have
rewritten them.
"My first reaction was disappointment, because there
didn't seem to be tangible changes other than the
planning supervisor is now CDM Coordinator, and you no
longer need to have a pre-tender health and safety
plan,"comments Roy Magro, construction director of
Millwood Designer Homes.
"One sensible and simple change is that the welfare
regulations now require you to supply chairs with backs for
workers rather than benches. If men have been working all
day it is important that they are able to rest their backs."
Another company which fulfils multiple roles is
Claremont Group Interiors, a design and build interiors
specialist which is a designer and contractor for projects
ranging from £10,000 to £2million, and as a full service
company is used to shouldering most of the client
obligations too: "By far the biggest change for us is the
level of responsibility now carried by the client. It was an
important part of our comprehensive service to take this
burden off our client, so this may affect the way we work,"
says Mike Considine, associate director and project
manager with Claremont.
"The other significant change for us is the competence
issue, which is about demonstrating the competence of
the people you are using on any given project," he added.
The new regulations are designed to identify risks and
improve planning and management of projects from the
start. They were also hyped as reducing bureaucracy, but
may add cost and bureaucracy to start with as the industry
gears up for its new responsibilities and finds the additional
training necessary to meet the
competence requirement. More articles from 4See Risk Management: | 
