PILOT SUCCESS FOR WORKERS SAFETY ADVISORS

HSC press release: C045:03 - 15 September 2003

The Health and Safety Commission (HSC) has today issued a report into the Worker Safety Advisers (WSA) pilot. The pilot forms part of the range of measures HSC agreed with Ministers in 2000 to promote greater employee involvement and consultation.

The WSA pilot introduced new and innovative mechanisms for deploying safety representatives into small firms to act as worker safety advisors. This sector is notoriously hard to reach and one that needs particular support in encouraging the partnerships and joint working fundamental for improving health and safety.

WSAs worked in a range of sectors providing support, advice and training to get the workforce more involved in health and safety, and create channels for improving dialogue between employers and employees. The pilot was set up to test the effectiveness of WSAs in:

• Promoting greater consultation on health and safety;
• Raising health and safety standards; and
• Broadening/increasing employers' and workers' knowledge of health and safety.

The nine-month pilot deployed nine WSAs in England (North East, North West, South West and London), Scotland and Wales. The HSE chose areas they believed would benefit most from external support including those within the voluntary, hospitality, engineering and construction sectors. A total of 88 employers participated in the pilot, predominantly from small firms, with two thirds having less than 25 employees.

Bill Callaghan in announcing that the report of the pilot was now available said; " I am pleased to have been personally involved with the WSA Pilot. What has impressed me was that where employees were involved they really did help solve health and safety problems. We now want to take forward the approach but more work needs to be done to find practical and cost effect ways of doing this."

The WSAs visited each of the organisations and quickly gained the trust of both the employers and employees. This was largely due to the sensitive handling by the advisers and was identified by the report as a key factor for success.

Employers and workers were surveyed before and after the pilot to evaluate the effectiveness of WSAs. The findings indicate that:

• Involvement of WSAs led to improvements in small non-unionised workplace approach to health and safety;
  
• Nearly 73% of employers said awareness had increased on health and safety matters and a third of employers stated that communications had improved;
  
• Over 75% of employers said they had made changes to their approach to health and safety as a result of the pilot with those changes taking place in:
  
  • Revising or introducing new policies and procedures (61%);
  • Regular health and safety discussion with staff (21%);
  • Risks assessments being carried out (11%);
    
• Nearly 70% of workers observed an increase in the amount of discussion on health and safety;
  
• The pilot facilitated the creation of safety committees in some workplaces; and
  
• Joint working on risk assessments and training for workers.

The report concludes that development of the scheme should continue with the core WSA model - a voluntary approach that uses the influence of key stakeholders to develop partnerships between employees and employers.

Notes to editors

1. The WSA report was produced on behalf of HSE by York Consulting with Fife College of Further and Higher Education. York were responsible for managing the day-to-day running of the WSAs and conducting the evaluation. HSE played a large part in recruiting many of the employers and the Federation of Master Builders (FMB) were responsible for getting all of the construction employers (29) signed up to the pilot.

2. The Health and Safety Commission agreed in May 2003 that the WSA pilot should be developed, that funding options should be explored and that capability building of the numbers of potential WSAs should be investigated.

3. HSE are now working on developing the pilot and is commissioning an action plan setting down the steps required to identify the right organisation(s) to run it and recruit the WSAs and employers; the steps required to ensure that the WSA approach would be sustainable and options for taking it forward in various sectors and geographical regions.

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