Big Project ME editor, Melanie Mingas spoke to some of Dubai’s leading experts in health and safety to find out what are the major issues that need to be addressed by the industry.
What have been the most significant recent developments regarding health and safety in the region?
MF: Abu Dhabi municipality is monitoring incident statistics over a 12 month period for the first time. Whether that is going to be adopted across the UAE remains to be seen, but it gives an opportunity to at least monitor compliance progress, which could be a light at the end of a rather dim tunnel at this point.
MK: The EHSMS has an obligation for all construction companies working in Abu Dhabi to put forward their EHSMS for approval. Habtoor Leighton Group (HLG) was one of the first four to be approved and on a quarterly basis we had to submit our statistics. The intent is to analyse those and establish a baseline criteria then to set key performance indicator (KPI) targets for the contractors within the segment.
MF: It does sound like a positive development; there were 29 fatalities in Abu Dhabi in 2011. From an industry perspective, how does that sounds benchmarked against other parts of the region?
MK: In terms of the amount of work in Abu Dhabi it’s unacceptable to have that many fatalities.
KF: Municipalities can collate the statistics on LTI and fatalities and use the data to implement measures to areas that require it, but this gathering of data is totally reliant on Companies being open and honest with their reporting which is sometimes not the case.
MK: Under the EHSMS, we as the main contractor are obliged to report accidents on site from subcontractors and that goes against our record, but it shows that there is another contractor. The municipality actually follows up with the contractor involved and that’s extremely good practice.
MF: Obviously you are on the sites and by analogy you have the global financial crisis and one of the reactions to that is more regulation. Is regulation the answer or is it a change of culture and attitude that is more important when it comes to health and safety?
MK: It’s probably a little of both. The changes in the regulation will have a knock on effect on the culture and one particularly good thing about the legislation in Abu Dhabi is that there is no grey area and it gives us a tool to state a requirement that has legal backing.
If we can use legislation the culture will improve automatically, it’ll have to. The two are very much linked, but the culture is changing on a lot of projects and we can see it. Some sites are better than others but you can see it in the workers themselves, even though they come from countries where the risks you see are acceptable. I have witnessed the same thing in Hong Kong, where there is no concept of danger.
KF Peoples’ definition of risk differs from person to person, for example we could catch somebody working on a very unsafe scaffold or not wear a safety harness when needed but when they see you they simply put their helmets on thinking that this is the only unsafe act they are committing.
SR: In additional to cultural background there is enormous pressure on the speed of projects so you don’t have time to train people properly and in some cases we see unskilled labourers have been employed without the relevant experience and become a civil mason. In the rush to speed things up all the quality process are jumped. We have witnessed this particularly in scaffoldings and even a major bridge collapsing, because these unskilled workers are then using poor products, again because the project is in a rush.
I think all these things add together to contribute to the particularly condition we have. From an insurance perspective, there are two types of losses; those which are very big in nature but happen only once every ten years, like a big fire. Then there are the losses that are quite frequent in nature and although they are minor incidences, they still create lost time. So instead of minimising the minor accidents the aim will be to prevent them, so the health and safety measures take effect right away.
At the same time when you take these mega losses, it’s beyond your capacity to stop them but what you can do is take precautions to minimise the impacts. For example when a fire occurs, how quickly can we respond? The most dangerous thing can be the materials stored on site and the construction waste, which cause a lot of fire.
If you take fire safety as an example, there are a lot of regulations but there are still fires. So how do you reduce the impact of mega losses? If the regulations have been followed you shouldn’t see more than one or two floors of a building burning.
MK: I think in the UAE, the civil defence has taken a big step forward with its introduction of the fire and life safety code and that also covers buildings under construction. Civil Defence has also appointed Houses of Excellence responsible for the projects, to ensure they comply with the fire and life safety code. I think this is something where the insurance industry could help those parties who they insure by being proactive in advising us in how to mitigate the risk of loss.
Within Abu Dhabi, the municipality has put a lot of effort intro training their inspectors; when they visit sites they know what they are talking about, they understand that we are all health and safety professionals and they are a trained inspector who can know how and where things have gone wrong.
That’s important; the inspectors should be properly trained and working with us.
We have introduced what is colloquially referred to as ‘black point inspections’ and it is a very similar system to a driving licence, except when we see an incident that is life threatening we actually look through the whole supervisory chain. Where negligence can be proven, warning points will be given and when a certain number of points have been accumulated, they are out.
We have written this into HLG’s management system and we are very proud with our management system. This is only one of the initiatives we have introduced.
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.
In terms of insurance pay outs for the more frequent incidents, would you say they are large enough to incentivise more stringent onsite regulations?
SR: Definitely. These incidences are quite high and there are claims made on a daily basis starting from minor bruising to fatal accidents, and more could be done to minimise these risks.
A lot of these things don’t cost money to implement but must be thought of from a human perspective, not financial; we are not talking about machines. There is a strong emotional issue attached to this too.
But one of the things happening here is that we don’t have data. We need to know what types of losses are happening and then establish dialogue with industry experts to report what is being seen. Then we all need to see if we can sit together and find a way to improve the situation.
MK: The publication of statistics would be beneficial to everybody. We have data on every accident from what happened to who it happened to and which part of the body is injured, but we don’t have that from outside the organisation. It would be useful to know what is prevalent in Saudi Arabia for example. What we do within HLG is log all incidents from every site on a Trade Accident Matrix and all our projects are on there to give a bigger picture which goes up to the corporate level, but only within HLG.
We know our biggest risk is working at height, but what we don’t have is data from companies in Qatar that allows us to identify that for example there is a prevalence of accidents in excavations. With this, we could then ask why. Is it the ground; the availability of equipment to make it stable; or is it just one of those strange anomalies for this year? But as the contractor it gives us focus to tackle a known risk.
KF: Companies that commit to Health and Safety will ultimately have fewer incidents and thus claims will be less for these companies, for this reason discounts offered by the Insurance Companies for the premiums is a good incentive.
SR: There is also internal pressure and the process of sharing data may reduce a company’s chance of winning a project. The possibilities of not finishing a project in time due to high accident rates can future projects.
MK: It’s almost a certainly that if you have a major incident onsite you will not finish your project on time and it’s not always realised that the impact goes far beyond the poor person who isn’t going to go back to their family. The emotional impact on other workers, directors, timescales, the investigators that visit; even for the accidents where there is no loss of life and no physical injury, I have known sites that have virtually stopped work for three months and at the end of that time if the schedule isn’t met you’re into liquidated debt.