Double H&S accreditation
May 20, 2016By Lee Bradbury – Health, Safety and Environmental Manager
In 1837 a certain Mr Emanuel Whittaker set up a joinery business in Oldham. In the same year, it was established for the first time that an employer owed, in common law, a duty of care to his employee, which you could argue was the beginning of the introduction of a workplace health and safety movement. Although it was not until 1974 that the we saw the introduction of the Health and Safety at Work Act
Now while health and safety can sometimes be the butt of press jibes, we should not forget that health and safety legislation has saved literally hundreds of lives – but that doesn’t mean job done – especially not in the construction industry. According to figures from the HSE in 2014/15 there were 65,000 self-reported non-fatal work place injuries or 3.1% of workers injured in the UK construction industry, compared with only 2% of workers across all industries. Sadly, there were 35 workers fatally injured which is 3.5 times the average rate across all industries.
This means that despite huge inroads into worker heath and safety, working in construction can be a dangerous place which is why here at Emanuel Whittaker we have a rigorous health and safety policy in place. In 2002, we achieved CHAS Accreditation (The Contractors Health and Safety Assessment Scheme) which is the benchmark measure for public organisations to comply with their duty to assess competence, under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations.
While CHAS is largely associated with those of us working for clients in the public and social housing sectors, the Safecontractor accreditation offers a similar assessment of standards but is more widely recognized by clients within other industry sectors.
One of our housing clients prefers to work with companies that are Safecontractor accredited and always happy to oblige our clients where we can, we decided to apply for this second accreditation to run alongside CHAS.
I am delighted to announce that after a successful vetting process which examines health and safety procedures and our track record for safe practice, Emanuel Whittaker has now been approved by Safecontractor which makes us doubly covered in terms of our health and safety practices.
Emanuel Whittaker – SafeContractor Certificate (2016-17)
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