Safety leaders

Spanswick explains the background to the new group: ”The tower crane task group was prompted by the Battersea incident [in September 2006, which killed the crane operator and a passerby]. Tower crane accidents are not increasing, and as a percentage the rate of incidents is pretty low, compared with the construction industry in general. But tower cranes are visible and high-profile. I don't want to allow the public to believe that one tower crane incident is symptomatic of huge problems in the industry.”

The Strategic Forum was born out of a report commissioned by the UK government in 1998 on ways to improve the culture of the construction industry. The tower crane group is its first subgroup, although perhaps not its first industry initiative. It recently convinced suppliers of power tools to provide more information on real-life hand-arm vibration data.

The tower crane group may be unique in the industry for its inclusiveness. It has representatives of every aspect of the tower crane business: customers (general contractors), suppliers (crane rental companies and a manufacturer), crane drivers, even a public interest group. Following a three-hour general discussion in August, Spanswick divided the group into subgroups, each tackling a specific issue.

John Spanswick: We're not trying to issue a 158-page document that no-one will ever read. We are talking about very simple things, short-term actions that will have some impact.

Shelley-Atkinson Frost: And it is right for the Strategic Forum to do it. We recognise that there is law in place: LOLER [The UK’s pioneering 1998 Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations]. We know that the regulatory package is right, but for some reason the industry is struggling with compliance. That's why it is right that the Strategic Forum takes it forward and not the regulatory body, the Health and Safety Executive.

JS: That's a fundamental issue. People in the industry and members of the public seem to think that safety is the job of the HSE. It isn't. The HSE is there to administer a legal process and proactively offer help and advice. The only way to change safety practice in any industry, construction included, is to take ownership. You could in theory change it by passing tons of legislation, but that's just impractical.

The industry has to take ownership. It is not the job of the HSE to do this by inspection. There has been criticism about the reduction of government departments, criticism that there are not enough inspectors. The HSE could have another 10,000 inspectors, they still wouldn't be able to visit all the construction sites in the UK regularly.

We are not trying to reinvent practices, but to make sure that people understand what they are and are competent to understand them. Supervision comes into this. The tower crane accidents that have happened at Bovis Lend Lease have come from either inadequate supervision—or a complete lack of supervision—during whatever is taking place. Tower cranes tend to get put up and taken down at weekends. So the challenge is, does everybody have their best people working at weekends? The answer is no, because they don't need to. There is an issue about competency during high-risk operations.

There is a lot of good practice in the industry. The question is how to share it. Tower crane accident information is shared readily. But I know that there are near misses, because they happen at BLL, where there are some lessons to be learned. We need to find some way to share that. The Strategic Forum is looking at how we set up a simple web site where people feed that in.

CT: How will you convince people to share their near misses?

JS: It is a cultural issue. I am the chairman of the Major Contractors Group. Three years ago we talked about sharing information on near misses. People said that was commercially sensitive: that is ludicrous. How could it be? I started by sending all of our [Bovis] near misses. Slowly others have been contributing theirs as well.

There is a fundamental issue here. If you just rely on reacting to events once they happen, you will never change anything. You might learn some things. But we need to look at leading indicators, like near misses, to help establish trends. We have to create an environment where if a tower crane driver thinks there is a problem, he feels he can mention it to someone. There is a barrier there now.”

Failsafe job sites

Spanswick joined Bovis in 1962, and was made the chief executive officer of the UK and European business in 2000, becoming chairman of Bovis Lend Lease Group in 2005. He was made one of nine health and safety commissioners in 2006, the group of people ultimately responsible for the UK's health and safety regulations. As part of his role as a commissioner, he has visited nuclear power plants, and was impressed by their procedures.

JS: On nuclear plants, everyone knows that the product that they are using is dangerous, they have some very clever simple procedures every day before they go in and work in reactors. It is not about filling in reams of paper.

There are all sorts of things happening on construction sites. Sometimes it is just that somebody made a mistake. But was the procedure and the system they were using fail safe? If people make mistakes inside a nuclear reactor, will we have another Chernobyl? This is the biggest challenge we face: there are lots of procedures in the industry, but are they really fail safe?

If everybody were religiously accurate about having exclusion zones, you could minimise the impact of incidents and stop people getting injured. That doesn't happen at the moment. Everyone accepts that exclusion zones are eminently sensible; this is a fail safe arrangement. But it does not happen enough.

CT: How can you arrange this on site?

JS: You can arrange it, I promise you. When I walk around construction sites with local staff, which I do regularly, all around the world, that is the usual reaction I get: 'That's impossible.' I ask them to imagine that their wife and family are now standing on the pavement. Are they quite happy to lift over their heads? They say, 'oh no, no, no.' Then why would they lift over workers' heads?

It is a real challenge on a restricted site. The answer is, you have to allow more time to build the job then. If that is the only safe way to do it. Our industry is great, isn't it, at trying to do 57 things at the site at the same time. That's the problem.

We need to get it into people's minds that it is totally unacceptable for anyone to be injured, God forbid get killed, on a construction site. Does that mean zero incidents? No, but if they really believe it, they will start to be proactive to stop it. It is about supervision, people walking by potential incidents before they happen. We need everybody who has the competence on construction sites to help people on sites who cannot help themselves.

SAF: There are softer issues as well, cultural and behavioural issues that need addressing. If we have tower crane drivers regularly going down for breaks, going to the toilet and not weeing in the crane, I'd say that's an achievement. What we are looking for are changing practices. If we achieve that, it has to be going down the right road to reducing incidents.

It's about bringing crane operators into the 21st century in terms of working practices, where they are not currently. It's about working practices, conditions, contractual conditions, hours of work, occupational health. They are safety-critical workers. We're looking for pre-employment screening.

JS: We need to look at drugs and alcohol policy. Tower cranes are pretty dangerous pieces of equipment. My own personal view is that we should ultimately have to look to move toward mandatory testing for not only tower crane drivers, but also other high-risk operators.

What happens next

By April the group aims to have received recommendations from the subgroups.

SAF: At the end of the day, there has to be a general objective that everyone agrees to. If everyone agrees that it is unacceptable for tower crane drivers to not be given enough time for breaks, then they have to work amongst themselves to find the right solution.

JS: What we are looking for are clear guidelines that everyone in that group will sign up to. They will go back to their organisations, and say, this is not open for debate, this is what we are going to do. The challenge will be to implement it all the way down into the small to medium enterprises. I don't underestimate that challenge, but at least we have set a standard for what people should do.

The group will come up with short-term and long-term recommendations. There will be a combination. If you want to change peoples' hearts and minds, you have to have short-term goals. Otherwise people will lose heart or will not believe that it's going to change. That doesn't mean that we won't look at some fundamental issues.

I have an ambition that would take many years to achieve, I suspect, that every tower crane in the UK has an electric lift to take up the operator and bring them down in case they become ill. Will that happen overnight? Of course not. It's impossible. But if everyone agrees, we have a long-term plan. The lifts are available now. If the industry says, this is what we are going to do, then it doesn't become a cost issue, it is just the cost of doing construction. The average age of tower crane drivers is 54. I couldn't climb that far every day. It can't be right. It's not efficient. If you add up the time tower crane drivers spend climbing up and down, they could be working. Safety brings huge commercial benefits.

We need to keep moving the bar up; that is what safety is all about. You never get it cracked. We shouldn't have any tower crane incidents. Some people might say that this is almost impossible. I understand that, but we need to keep moving the bar up.