No business case for safety stats

Contractors are being thrown a "red herring" by the Health & Safety Commission (HSC) in its drive to increase company reporting on health and safety performance, according to the Construction Confederation's (CC) outgoing director of health and safety Suzannah Nichol.

Just 103 of the country's top 350 contractors have accepted the challenge issued last March by the HSC to commit to producing health and safety figures in their annual reports.

Only five of these, Balfour Beatty, Amec, Carillion, Skanska and Mowlem, are top-10 contractors.

Speaking after the HSC's Putting Health and Safety on your Strategic Agenda conference in London, Nichol said that the HSC had "missed the point".

"Where are the business case incentives for chief executives in construction?" she said. "I hear the HSC asking for companies to put health and safety at the top of the agenda, but that's just not the case in reality. Unless the decision makers know of the advantages to the bottom line of their company, there will be no changes. Just beating the health and safety drum will get us nowhere."

"If you want contractors to sit up and take note, just use examples such as Wigan and Leigh NHS Trust which cut the costs of manual handling injuries from £800,000 in 1993 to just £10,000 last year. Now we need to show how," added Nichol, who is leaving the CC to become chief executive of the National Specialist Contractors Council.

Ex-president of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health Ian Waldram said: "If this process did have a business case, construction wouldn't be in the mess it is in now."

However, HSC chairman Bill Callaghan defended the department's strategy.

"The industry has a key role to play and it is through shared experience and a change of culture that this will happen," he said. "We realise that more work needs to be done on a business case, but this must be driven from the industry to produce indicators."