Safety First

In this issue Bernard Holloway previews a new Practical Sheep, Goat and Alpaca regular series: ‘Health & Safety’. Even smaller farmers and smallholders with older tractors need to take care to avoid accidents and we aim to give you some pointers.

Farming has the worst health and safety record of all industries in this country. I’m sure we all agree that this is an unenviable, indeed untenable, situation. Regarding my own background, I spent more than 40 years in construction and was very much in the vanguard of the implementation of ‘The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 1994’ when they were introduced, and they have been regularly reviewed since.

The regulations were introduced to govern the way construction projects were designed and managed from conception until completion, identifying and hopefully eliminating poor working practices, through design, and methods of construction, aiming to control, reduce and perhaps even eliminate accidents. This was achieved through drawing up method statements for each specific operation and assessing the risk.

This way of looking at what needed to be done was channelled down through the construction team to those actually undertaking the works. Many reading this are probably familiar with this, or similar legislation. Inevitably, most of us ‘old hands’ saw this initially as an unnecessary and unwelcome intrusion from E.U. bureaucrats who, we felt, should stick to running governments and leave us ‘experts’ to get on with running the industry. How wrong we were!

Over time, we began to see the benefits of working to a clearly thought out work regime. The method statements, risk assessments, site inductions and training, became concepts that were no longer foreign. Fatalities and injuries began to fall. Who wouldn’t like to see a similar reduction in farming? I realise that it is not possible to import a method of working that has shown dramatic improvements in safety from one industry to another but some elements are transferable.