12 January 2010

Southwark Council has said that prior to the Lakanal House fire last July, it had mistakenly relied on the training of its housing officers by London Fire Brigade to meet fire safety requirements for some of its tower blocks.

In an interview on last Thursday's BBC Radio 4 Face the Facts programme, which investigated tower block fire safety, Kim Humphreys, deputy leader of Southwark Council, confirmed the council had changed its approach to conducting fire risk assessments.

"London Fire Brigade provided our housing officers with training which we presumed, erroneously, would meet the requirements. This has not been the case and that's why we decided that we are going to have outside experts provide us with fire risk assessments for those complex blocks. We have identified that we want to go further than just the basic fire risk assessment and we will be carrying out intrusive inspections of those blocks."

Responding to questions about the relatively few fire risk assessments the council, along with other councils, had carried out prior to the Lakanal House fire compared to the number conducted afterwards, councillor Humphreys added: "I fully accept that as a council it would have been better if we were further advanced in terms of those fire risk assessments."

On a section of its website on the issues arising from the fire at Lakanal House, Southwark Council says:

"As we are London's largest social landlord, with over 50,000 properties and over 300 high rise blocks, we take our responsibilities seriously. The responsibility to do a fire risk assessment (FRA) was transferred to local councils in 2006. We asked the London Fire Brigade (LFB) to train our staff to conduct fire risk assessments and they trained 132 Southwark housing officers.

"Following the training programme a number of follow-up sessions were run to support staff. Blocks over six storeys have had an FRA conducted by a council officer. Where we believe it is necessary we can escalate the fire risk assessment for further technical or intrusive work, carried out by external experts."

London Fire Brigade has confirmed that it provided 11 fire risk awareness training days for Southwark housing officers.

07 January 2010

A new report published by the Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL) has revealed a high sickness absence rate among waste and recycling industry workers.

The report, commissioned by the HSE, was compiled between 2007 and 2008 from 16 local authorities. It discovered that the waste sector recorded more days off work than any other department within local government. It found that waste industry employees each had an average of 12.8 days absence, which is higher than the average figure of 9.6 days absence for local government workers. However, a disparity in documentation methods between different local authorities meant they were unable to accurately capture the reasons for absence.

To further strengthen the findings of the report, two private waste and recycling companies were included in the study. Employees for these firms reported an average of 13.2 days absence, this was higher than an average of seven days absence for private sector workers in other industries.

HSL statistician Dr Eileen Holmes said:

“The research revealed some interesting findings and indicated there are higher rates of absenteeism in local authority waste workers than in the wider public sector.

“While we collected some useful data, we did find there were gaps in our knowledge because of various approaches to recording reasons for absence. These varied from a set of well-defined categories to free text fields depending on which local authority you asked. This meant it had not been possible to identify the most common reason for someone taking time off work and, it follows, to recommend measures to highlight and address those underlying causes.”

09 November

A police instructor was fined after a worker was accidentally shot during a firearms training exercise. It has now emerged that the officer had failed his safety instructor’s course.

For more on this story, please visit the Safety and Health Practitioner website.

Managing asbestos

Friday, 22 May 2009

Asbestos is the single biggest cause of work related deaths in the UK.  The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have updated the information on their website with a guide to managing asbestos in premises, the hidden killer video and an asbestos image gallery.

For further information please visit the HSE website

Recognition for exceptional work

Monday, 15 June 2009

Andy Hollingshead, a Public Services Group (PSG) member, has been shortlisted for a national award.

For further details please visit the News and campaigns page.

New guidance on hazardous waste

Thursday, 06 August 2009

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has produced new guidance on storing hazardous waste at household waste recycling centres.

For further information please visit the HSE website.

Children's club drivers to be vetted

Friday, 11 September 2009

New rules have been brought in by the Home Office to say that anyone who has regular contact with children must register with the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA).  The Vetting and Barring scheme could include 11.3 million people.

For further information please visit the BBC website.

£10 million fund available for low carbon initiatives

Monday, 28 September 2009

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has launched a scheme to provide funding for initiatives by local authorities, charities and social enterprises to fight climate change.

Communities can apply for a share of a £10 million fund as part of the Low Carbon Communities Challenge.

For further details please visit the DECC website.