Construction industries among most dangerous

Despite progress, the construction industries are still rated among the most dangerous in Britain

Despite the reduced incidence of deaths and major injuries since the original Safety Summit five years ago, Kevin Myers, chief inspector of construction at the United Kingdoms Health and Safety Executive, still finds the construction industry among the most dangerous in Britain.

When its leaders met in February 2001 under the shadow of this deep-seated blemish on its image, the industry pledged itself to revitalising efforts to improve health and safety by adopting the targets formulated by the Construction Industry Advisory Committee CONIAC, whose job is to advise the Health and Safety Commission on hazards to health in the building, civil engineering and engineering construction industries.

The CONIAC targets were as follows: to reduce the incidence rate of fatalities and major injuries in the U.K.

industry by 40 per cent by 2004/05, mid-way from the baseline year 1999/00 when the ten-year revitalising program began, and by 66 per cent by 2009/10 to reduce the incidence rate of work-related ill health by 20 per cent by 2004-05 and by 50 per cent by the end of the period.

to reduce the number of working days lost per 100,000 workers from work-related injury and ill-health by 20 per cent at half-way and by 50 per cent by 2009/10 These were much more ambitious than the overall target set by the Health and Safety Commission and its executive arm HSE for the whole of British industry.

They are seeking over the same period a reduction in the incidence of fatalities and major injuries by 10 per cent, in the number of working days lost by 30 per cent, and ill-health at work by 20 per cent.

In the five years that have elapsed since the first Safety Summit, the construction industry has made undoubted progress in reducing the toll of death and injury.

This was acknowledged by Bill Callaghan, chair of the Health and Safety Commission, when he said: "We can say that the industry is changing for the better and we have achieved the lowest accident rates on record in 2003-04 But at 70 or more fatalities every year and major injuries in recent years running at around 4,500 annually, the accident rate remains a painful scar on the industrys image of progress and achievement.

The summary of fatalities so far in the present year, from March 2004 to mid-February 2005, released by the Health and Safety Executive on the occasion of the summit meeting, records 64 deaths, all of them men.

That must mean at least 60 families shattered by the loss of a father, a husband and a breadwinner.

They were all in tragic circumstances.

Senior people of the calibre of those attending the summit meeting agree that most of them are avoidable.

The last one recorded before the meeting on 2005-02-24 read: During the delivery of roadstone the deceased was holding the handle at the rear of a tipping lorry.

When the body of the lorry was in the raised position it made contact with an overhead 11kv power line.

It was not the only accident of its kind in the previous 10 months.

The total of fatalities could well reach 70 by the close of the current accounting year, the same number as in 2002-03 and 2003-04.

That doesnt sound like progress.

Each one of these deaths and serious injuries sends a shock wave through the industry which undermines morale and spreads its devastating effects into the families and communities associated with it.

Safety chief deplores record on occupational health In his recently published third report on the construction industrys progress since the February 2001 summit, covering the two years December 2002 to December 2004, Kevin Myers is somewhat less critical than he was about the industrys shortcomings in his second report dated January 2003.

At that time, commenting on the accident statistics for the previous ten years, he said: "The construction industry remains one of the most dangerous in Britain.

The fatal injury rate of 4.2 [per 100,000 workers] compares unfavourably with the all industry average of 0.88.

"The baseline year for the revitalising target for reducing the incidence rate of reported fatal and major injuries to workers is 1999/2000 when the rate was 278 per 100,000 workers.

The rate for 2001/02 was 244, 12 per cent less than the baseline But, he added, the indications are that the reduction in constructions reported deaths and major injuries against the previous two years could be a reflection of a shortfall in reporting levels rather than an absolute reduction in accidents.

So there a question mark remained over the validity of the figures being gathered from the industry, though that question mark hangs more over the incidence of major injuries which keep people off work rather than deaths which are almost always reported.

At that time Mr Myers also described the occupational health record of the industry as bad if not worse than its safety record.

This is the cause of a significant loss of working time to the industry, though when that report was written the scale of the loss was proving difficult to quantify.

The best the HSE could do then was to cite an estimated 1.2 million working days lost in 1995 due to work-related ill health.

In 2001-02 it was estimated that 137,000 people working in the industry during the past eight years had suffered from an illness which they believed was caused or made worse by their jobs.

Nevertheless, a certain amount of progress has been made in reaching the targets set by CONIAC as the industrys representative body.

To follow this one needs to understand that the comparisons from one year to the next are based on the rate of change in the incidence of accidents against the targets.

What Kevin Myers January 2005 report shows is that from a baseline close to the HSEs conservative target of a 10 per cent reduction over 10 years, since 2001/02 the incidence of accidents per 100,000 construction workers employed has fallen by roughly ten per cent a year.

This ought to be recognised as a big step forward.

But it is well short of the 40 per cent so boldly declared as the mid-way target back in 2001.

Millions of working days lost to ill-health As the latest report put it, although the number of construction workers killed in 2003-04 (provisional figure) was the same as in the previous year, the rate of fatal injuries fell to 3.5 per 100,000 - the lowest rate on record.

This represents a 26 per cent fall since the baseline year of 1999/2000.

It is however a 41 per cent improvement since the 2001 safety summit when the incidence of construction accidents was hitting a peak about 25 per cent above the base line.

Regrettably, although the incidence rate for major injuries which keep people off work was in 2003-04 the lowest since 1996/97, the overall rate of decline has been slower than that for fatal injuries.

The major injury rate as presently quoted represents a 15 per cent fall since the baseline year 1999/00 or 12 per cent since the summit five years back.

The rate at which people were last year complaining of the ill effects of working on construction sites stood at 4400 per 100,000, about the same as in 2001/02.

The lost time due to illness in that year is put at 2.8 million working days.

Not much sign of improvement there.

If anything, these losses appear to have increased since the 1995 estimate of 1.2 million working days.

Though construction is exceeding the all-industry target for improvement in rates for fatal and major injuries, it is not yet achieving its own target.

It will need an exceptional effort to get the rates back on track if the 2009-10 targets are to come anywhere near realisation.

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