For years, the dangers in the waste industry have been prevalent. However, Health and Safety statistics generally relate to when things go wrong (Incidents, Accidents, RIDDOR’s or fatalities etc). Injuries and fatalities, as severe as they are, have become the performance benchmark that we all now measure against in terms of Health and Safety performance – but should this change?
The ESA accident charter in the early ‘noughties’ set a target for a 12% year on year reduction in waste-industry accidents. At the time this was deemed to be very challenging, however, accident data shows accident rates fell from 4150 in 2003 to 2428 in 2007 but have started to plateau in recent years.
We concentrate our efforts on reporting when things go wrong so that we forget about the positive aspects and everything we do to reduce the risk of accidents and ultimately, fatalities.
Health and Safety legislation, guidance, training and enforcement (whether proactive or reactive) have all contributed to the reduction in accidents rates over the years. For example, In 2020/21, the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) issued 139 improvement notices and 52 prohibition notices (40 of these related to inadequate welfare provision, which is a key aspect of the Health & Safety At Work etc Act 1974 - after 48 years we still can’t get the basics right!)
That said, the HSE’s annual accident statistics for 2020/21 show the five-year fatality average for the industry still sits at 8 fatalities per year, which is 17 times higher than the all industry rate across the UK.
We don’t appear to acknowledge or appreciate supervisory monitoring inspections or maintenance planning as examples of a proactive approach to improving health and safety unless something goes wrong. Is it time we changed the way we looked at accidents statistics and perhaps compared the percentage of accident free time vs Lost Time Incidents? This could put the industry in a much more favourable position, because, let’s face it…we are never going to reach a Zero accident rate!
Annually, around 4,000 workers suffer non-fatal injuries and around 5,000 workers suffer a work-related illness. The public sector makes up around 30% of all employment in the waste sector but, alarmingly, the public sector is responsible for around 44% of all RIDDOR reports. What are we doing wrong?
Over the last five years, the number of fatalities from poor lock off was in 3rd place, however, this is now increased to 1st place along with fatalities from vehicle movements (workplace transport), both of which are high on the HSE’s agenda.
Failure to follow the HSE’s HSG65 ‘Plan, Do, Check and Act’ approach can be evidenced through many of their recent successful prosecutions where there has been a clear lack of supervision, monitoring or inspection, which are now common trends in many avoidable accidents.
To further improve the guidance available to the sector, WISH (In collaboration with the HSE as the enforcing body) have revised WASTE 04 (Safe Operation of Waste and Recycling Collection vehicles) and created a new formal guidance document WASTE 29 (Practical Isolation and Lock off Procedures) both of which can be found at www.wishforum.org.uk/wish-guidance.
At some point in the future, we may see Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) being used for proactive Health and Safety monitoring (*where they are not already in place), especially with outsourced contracts. HSE prosecutions continue to evidence a lack of supervision and monitoring so as the most dangerous industry, we need to shift our focus to a more proactive method of health and safety performance monitoring!
