In a region where money and deadlines drive things to such an extent, insurance plays a large part in incentivising health and safety. How are policies structured in order to incentivise policy holders to minimise risk to their workers?

MK: At HLG we are very proud of our record. We have an open and honest reporting system and sometimes for that reason we are seen as a bad contractor, because when we have an accident we tell people, investigate it, and publish the results. It helps us improve and in turn others too.

KF: You see contractors who report millions and millions of man hours being worked and they haven’t even had so much as a first aid incident, a cut finger for example, which tells me their reporting culture is less than perfect and ultimately will be detrimental to preventing accidents in the future because trends and so on cannot be identified and acted upon.

MK: On one HLG job a company arrived to paint a building and when I saw them set up it was clear they weren’t working safely. I said they couldn’t do the job the way they set out to because it wasn’t safe and a couple of phone calls later their boss said ‘we have to re-quote if you want it done safely’.

And it is very sad but it’s true. If you want it done safely it will cost you more.

KF: We have experienced the same thing with defected material, unsafe scaffolds, and when it is brought up they say it wasn’t tendered to do safely.

The further down the chain you go with subcontractors, that’s where you get the problems.

Should there be a watchdog to which to report such incidents, or even the subcontractors themselves, rather than leaving it to corporate vigilance?

MK: We issued a black point on the Capital Gate Tower, in Abu Dhabi. The project manager also received a black point and actually fined the sub contractor AED60,000 and went to a lot of lengths to ensure it wouldn’t happen again, and therefore reduced the fine.

KF: I do know Abu Dhabi is looking at trade licensing and the licensing of tradesmen. In Hong Kong every person who enters a site has to have a trade licensing card, even if it is just a labour card. I think that would be another major initiative here in the Emirates, where everybody who is employed on a construction site firstly must have basic safety training, and Dubai and Abu Dhabi Municipalities are working towards that and are possibly making it a federal requirement., but then the trades licensing would be the next step on top of that.

MK: It would be the same as the construction scheme in the UK.

How easy would it be to introduce a tradesman licensing scheme in light of the pace at which other health and safety legislation has been introduced?

MK: Once a competency standard has been decided upon it could theoretically take around five years. For example HLG has its own training academy licensed by third parties and one thing we do is location training and QCC has expressed an interest in learning from us. The standard we have set ourselves is the City and Guild standard, which is a UK certification scheme. It has only taken us two years to set that up so, should the authorities commit to it, they could have a system in place that they could roll out to the industry and the tradesmen that are in the UAE have to become licensed over a two or three year period.

So within five years everybody who is here could become licensed and those people who come in have to pass a competency standard before they are licensed or they would have to go into a training establishment to become licensed and gain municipality approval.

It’s like the EHSMS, they had a will to do it and it worked.

At the moment there is a bit of a race between Abu Dhabi and Dubai to make such training mandatory.