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Gender equality
Practice meets perfect
May/June 2023 issue

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After Grenfell Tower we must short circuit the cycle of deregulation and disaster

Open-access content Tuesday 27th June 2017
From the archive:  Just so you know, this article is more than 3 years old.

In preparation for the change, the head of safety at a university took his freshly drawn-up set of fire risk assessments to his local fire authority, which previously had the task of certifying the premises, and asked if an officer familiar with the campus would give an informal opinion on whether they were sufficient or needed more work.

When reminded that it was no longer the fire service's job, the OSH head persisted until the officer told him: "If you have a fire and we prosecute you afterwards, then you'll know your assessment wasn't good enough."

The blaze that engulfed the west London local-authority high-rise Grenfell Tower last month, leaving an estimated 79 people dead or missing, and the public response, shows such a lagging test of precautions is not an acceptable response to the scale of the hazard.

The catastrophe raises many questions that may be answered by either the police and Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigation or the planned public inquiry. Some of them are specific to Grenfell Tower and those managing it. They include whether the block's fire risk assessment was updated to reflect its recent refurbishment and whether its smoke extraction system functioned properly or exacerbated problems when getting residents out.

Other issues raised since the disaster have a wider scope. Have the cladding and other retrofitted measures to improve the thermal insulation of older blocks unwittingly increased their fire loading? Does the standard fire service advice to high-rise residents to stay in their flats in a fire need further qualification?

But there is also a much broader question. That is whether a decade and more of public sector budget cuts and a "light touch" regulatory approach increased the likelihood of a major incident. The slowness of the government to overhaul the fire prevention section of the Building Regulations, flagged as confusing and in need of reform four years ago by the inquiry into the fire that claimed six lives at another London public housing block, Lakanal House, may be evidence that they did.

Former HSE chief executive Geoffrey Podger has warned in the past year of the cycle of gradual deregulation that is arrested only by a major catastrophe, to be followed by tighter controls, before memory of the reason for their necessity fades.

Grenfell Tower has already prompted an unprecedented joint call on government by IOSH and other UK safety bodies, inspired by former 2012 Olympics safety head Lawrence Waterman, to cease safety deregulation.

Whether the fire marks an inflexion point on the scale of the Flixborough or Hillsborough disasters is not yet clear, but we owe it to the victims to try to break the pattern of history repeating.

You may also be interested in...

Image credit: ©Alan Davidson/SilverHub/REX/Shutterstock

 Safety bodies issue joint call for deregulation halt after Grenfell Tower fire

Wednesday 21st June 2017
In an open letter to Prime Minister Theresa May, more than 70 leading organisations and figures from the UK’s safety and health profession, including IOSH, the British Safety Council and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, have asked her to “scrap the government’s approach to health and safety deregulation and think again”.
Open-access content

 How the gig economy brings responsibility to both sides

Wednesday 26th July 2017
As the Gig Guide feature (IOSH Magazine August 2017 issue) shows, in disrupting the markets in which they operate, companies such as Uber and Deliveroo are asking questions of the safety and health profession.Their workers are choosing flexibility and short-term contracts and this creates a fluidity in workforces that tests traditional methods of risk management.
Open-access content

 Error on trial

Tuesday 20th June 2017
In most other areas of endeavour we learn from triumphs, but in safety the focus is often on disaster. We are knowledgeable enough to realise that we cannot simply blame the end user, but we still try to unpick long, causal chains of errors – of end users, of senior management, of designers – seeing human error as something to be designed, managed or reinforced out of an organisation.
Open-access content

 Marian Kelly, London Underground

Monday 24th July 2017
London’s underground railway is one of the busiest mass transit systems in the world, carrying four million passengers a day – five million at peak, more than the population of the Republic of Ireland. Trains on the busiest of its 11 lines run on average every 100 seconds.
Open-access content

 Why politicians should work to an ethical code post-Grenfell Tower

Wednesday 26th July 2017
The scale is significant: we know that disasters at Hillsborough and Bradford City football stadiums led to profound changes in the management of sports grounds, the explosion and fire on the Piper Alpha rig changed the North Sea oil regime, and rail accidents such as the crash at Ladbroke Grove in 1999 forced greater control of railway maintenance.
Open-access content
Routledge (www.routledge.com

 The End of Heaven – disaster and suffering in a scientific age

Thursday 20th July 2017
  Rating: It opens with a first-person voice (Dekker’s) recalling the death of an unborn child.
Open-access content
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