The most life threatening occupation is a soldier on active duty in a war zone. This is obvious from the frequent reports of British fatalities in Afghanistan with the casualties named and pictured on tv.
But there are other jobs here in the UK which also carry serious risks; one of the most dangerous is construction. You seldom see a breaking news flash about someone killed on a building site unless it is after a major incident. But builders’ deaths are relatively common with around a dozen major construction injuries every day!
As every flooring contractor knows, the enforcement of health & safety regulations varies from one site to another, even in the same company. The Health & Safety Executive (HSE), set up to prosecute health & safety breaches, has long suffered from under-funding. But now the coalition government is proposing to by-pass the HSE altogether. At present HSE inspectors can make unannounced site visits and order any safety issues to be rectified. In serious cases they can close down a construction site until the problem is put right. Indeed hundreds of breaches, some extremely serious, are uncovered in every HSE ‘blitz’.
The new proposal, said to be based on ‘the needs of business’, is for major building firms to ‘purchase a private safety audit’. This would bar HSE inspectors from entering their sites except in the case of an emergency. Meanwhile, funding to HSE would be further cut, drastically reducing the number of inspectors. The fears are that, having obtained a ‘safety audit’, firms will be less vigilant about enforcing health & safety, viewing the permission for self-regulation as simply an excuse to cut corners, especially in fast-track projects.
Alan Ritchie, head of the construction union UCATT, calls the idea of privatising health & safety as ‘the politics of the madhouse’. He says the new government proposal will ‘cut safety standards’ even more and describes it as ‘sinister’. He is convinced that it will endanger the lives of building workers and lead to more deaths and serious injuries.
Mr Ritchie also dismisses the recent fall in construction deaths as the result of less work during the downturn, and points out that the number of fatal injuries has increased after every recession.
It is easy for people to attack tough safety regulation as ‘the nanny state’ and ridicule aberrations such as the one headmaster who made children wear helmets and goggles to play conkers. The new government, eager to slash every expense in sight, seems to have seized this as an excuse to undermine the already limited protection for builders.
Many flooring contractors will suffer as a result of the massive cuts in school building. This new proposal is a severe blow to the entire construction industry.

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