Health and Safety
Executive / Commission
Press releases
GNN/YH/612/07 20 December 2007
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has this week begun an intensive inspection campaign that will take inspectors on to more than 100 farms in Yorkshire over the next month.
Inspectors have begun getting out and about on farms in the Harrogate, York and Leeds area to check on how farmers are handling work on fragile roofs, with ladders and all-terrain vehicles as well as looking at their approach to safety around livestock and children. Inspectors will be looking, for example, at quad bike training and the provision and use of protective headgear, as well as the safe use and maintenance of lift trucks and other vehicles – all key issues for farm safety.
This initiative follows on from a special Safety and Health Awareness Day held on the Great Yorkshire Showground in September at which 250 of the region’s farmers, joined for the first time by their families, attended for practical help and advice by agricultural training specialists.
HSE Inspector Julian Franklin says:
"The event in September was a great success. It gave us an opportunity to speak to a large number of farmers in one place at one time, many of them from just the small family enterprises that most lack health and safety advice. Now we are following this up by trying to reach out to some of the farmers we failed to contact at that event.
"Farming is a risky business. Agriculture has one of the worst fatal accident and occupational ill health records of any major employment sector.
"Although it represents only 1.7 per cent of the workforce, the industry still accounts for 16 per cent of the fatal injuries to workers across the country. In 2006-7 34 people died as result of accidents in agriculture cross the country as a whole – two of them In Yorkshire and Humber.
"By reaching out to more of the farmers in this particular part of the region, and on their own premises, we hope to get some hard-hitting messages home to them about issues that may be crucial to their own health, safety and well-being."Call HSE's InfoLine, Tel: 08701 545500,
or write to: HSE InfoLine, Caerphilly Business Park, Caerphilly CF83 3GG.
Contact Anne Haynes, Tel: 0113 341 3172
or email: anne.haynes@gnn.gsi.gov.uk
HSE information and press releases can be accessed on the Internet:
http://www.hse.gov.uk/
Issued on behalf of HSE by GNN Yorkshire and Humber