New Health and Safety Law – Employers Face Prospect of Custodial Sentences

Breaches in Health and Safety law could now land employers or their staff in prison, where previously they would have faced fines. The Health and Safety (Offences) Act 2008 came into effect on 16^th January 2009 and means that employees or their bosses could now face up to two years in prison for breaking health and safety legislation.

This applies to anyone who contributes to a health and safety offence, even if an accident or injury has not occurred. In other words, if someone plays around or behaves recklessly, and they have been properly trained, they could personally be prosecuted and given a custodial sentence. The reckless behaviour does not need to result in a serious incident, only the possibility of one. The same thing applies for anyone who fails to take proper care for other people’s safety, including, for example, not carrying out a risk assessment or fire risk assessment.

The purpose of the law is to try to get employers to take health and safety matters seriously. Over 200 people are killed every year in accidents at work, and many more are injured. The costs to businesses are huge.

The new law also means that even minor breaches of health and safety rules now carry fines of up to £20,000. Whereas fines were previously related to specific serious breaches, people can now be fined for just about any health and safety offence.

While it has been suggested that custodial sentences will only be considered for the most serious offences, the law gives the courts considerable discretion, so we shall have to wait and see how it is interpreted. Many people expect a rush of prosecutions by the Health and Safety Executive, as they attempt to demonstrate that the law is effective and the consequences real.

The Chair of the Health and Safety Executive, Judith Hackitt, said:

"This Act gives lower courts the power to impose higher fines for some health and safety offences. It is right that there should be a real deterrent to those businesses and individuals that do not take their health and safety responsibilities seriously. Everyone has the right to work in an environment where risks to their health and safety are properly managed, and employers have a duty in law to deliver this.”

The law slipped in rather quietly without attracting much media attention, even though the implications are actually more far reaching than the Corporate Manslaughter Act, which attracted quite a lot of interest and publicity when it came into force last April.

The thing to remember is that the change in the law does not place any new duties on employers, and those following the law have nothing to fear anyway. The Act is intended to target those few people who wilfully ignore health and safety rules and put their staff or colleagues at risk by cutting corners or being careless.

Get free advice and guidance on health and safety at work and workplace safety law at Fire-RiskAssessment.com, including detailed guidance on carrying out your own Fire Risk Assessment.

Prevent False Alarms On Your Fire Alarm System

While emergency evacuation drills are good practice in fire safety and a key part of staff training, false alarms can simply be a waste of everyone’s time. Not least for the emergency services, who may be called out for no reason if your alarm system is automated. We should all do what we can to ensure that the Fire Services are free to deal with real emergencies.

If false alarms occur frequently, they can have a real and disruptive effect on your business and productivity. The other negative impact can be that if you have too many false alarms, the Fire Services will not respond without a specific manual request. That is not good news if you ever have a real fire.

A false alarm can be a symptom of a fault on your system, so they should never be ignored. If you can’t find the cause of an alarm activation, it is always best to call in an engineer to investigate the problem. The last thing you need is for the same thing to happen a day or two later because of same small fault. Even worse, it could be a signal that an element of the alarm is not properly functioning, which could have a serious impact in the event of a real fire, allowing the fire to spread much more than it otherwise might.

Many false alarms are caused by people in the building not being aware that a fire alarm system is in place, or at least not understanding the types of thing that can activate the fire alarm. You can deal with these through a few simple procedures:

Ensure staff and visitors know that your building is protected by an automatic fire alarm system

• Make this information part of your induction training and fire safety training for all staff.

• Have prominent notices up at all main entrances to your workplace. Use the following wording:“These premises are protected by an automatic fire alarm system. Please obtain permission from the site manager before undertaking any work involving flame, smoke, heat or sparks.”

Ensure that no-one carries out any ‘hot works’ without permission from the Health and Safety Representative, fire Marshall, or whoever has responsibility for authorising such works

• Staff need to know that any work involving flame, smoke, heat or sparks must have special permission.

• Build this into staff training and ensure it is included in staff manuals, operating plans, etc.

• Have a Hot Works Permit system or similar mechanism to ensure that contractors working on site follow your safe working procedures.

• Build this requirement into contracts with any contractors who will undertake work on the premises.

Ensure that no work involving the generation of dust or the use of spray paint is done in an area with smoke detectors in, unless the detectors are properly protected.

• Make sure that someone has specific personal responsibility for dealing with this and similar matters.

• If possible, smoke detectors can be replaced with heat detectors, but only by a qualified engineer.

• The alternative to swapping to heat detectors is to cover and protect the smoke detectors during the period of work (with paper, plastic, etc).

• This should not be done lightly, as covered smoke detectors will clearly not work correctly, if at all, in the event of a real fire.

• The situation should be risk assessed, and alternative means of detection put in place (such as a person in the area with specific fire-watching brief during the period of works).

• Make sure that someone has the specific personal responsibility for removing the covering from the detectors when the work is finished. It is vital that this is done promptly so that the alarm system is fully functional straight away.

• Ensure that the fire alarm system is tested once the work is completed, to ensure that it is functioning correctly.
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Following these simple guidelines should eliminate the vast majority of your false alarms and save you and the fire service a lot of unnecessary work.

For more detailed guidance on Fire Risk Assessment and many other health and safety issues please visit Fire-RiskAssessment.com

PAT Testing – Find Out What The Law Says About Portable Appliance Testing

One of the most common causes of fires in the workplace is faulty electrical equipment. Sometimes these faults are not obvious to the untrained eye, and it is fair to say that quite often they are obvious, but are not properly dealt with.

There are various pieces of UK law that deal with electrical safety at work, but the main ones are the 'Electricity At Work Regulations 1989', and the 'Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998'. UK employers have a legal responsibility to have all portable electrical equipment regularly tested, and they must take steps to maintain this equipment is satisfactory state of repair.

What Is A Portable Appliance?

Portable appliances are any item of electrical equipment that is not fixed or permanently attached to the building. A simplistic definition is that it is anything with a plug on, which is a reasonable rule of thumb, but not quite accurate in all circumstances. Most portable appliances will connect to a socket with a plug, but there are some exceptions, so do not use it as a definite rule. The safest definition is of something designed to be moved while connected to an electrical supply.

The requirement is to test and maintain any portable appliance in the workplace, so that does not mean only items that have been purchased or brought onto the premises by the main business or operator. For example, it also applies to equipment brought in by contractors, the DJ’s flashing lights for the Christmas disco, and the curling tongs used by Shelia the secretary before she goes out on Friday night. In other words, as the employer you need to have systems in place to control any electrical item that is brought onto the premises for any reason.

Who Can Do PAT Testing?

The law says that PAT testing should be carried out by a Competent Person. Which means that whoever does it needs to know what they are doing, having been properly trained in PAT testing. This does not rule out doing it in-house, as there are plenty of short courses available that you can put your own staff through. You can buy all the necessary testing equipment and software for recording your results.

The alternative is to get a specialist contractor in to do it for you.

How Often Do I Need To Test Portable Appliances?

The law is pretty vague about this, meaning that the employer has to assess the risk for each type of equipment and make a judgement about it. A good average would be an annual test, but there are some items that definitely require more frequent testing, and some that you can get away with less than that. Something that is moved around and used every day (such as a hand drill) is going to need much more regular testing, perhaps quarterly, with daily visual checks.

The frequency of testing has to be a judgement call on the part of the Responsible Person. You can amend the frequency according to your results. For example, if you find faults with something every time it is tested, the frequency probably needs increasing, whereas if there are many repeated tests without problems, you may be able to reduce the frequency.

Recording The Results Of Your PAT Testing

The legislation is once again not prescriptive with regard to recording the results of your PAT testing, but it would not make a lot of sense to not record the results of your testing.

The main record for testing is that each item tested will be given a label with details of the date of the test, the date the next test will be due, whether it passed or failed and a unique identification number. The ID number will often be accompanied by a bar code, for recording systems which use this method to make the recording and reporting on individual items much easier.

For further information and advice on health and safety related issues, and detailed guidance on carrying out your own fire risk assessments, see Fire-RiskAssessment.com