November 2017 Legal Update:
The great repeal bill is now going through parliament.
As its informal name suggests, the repeal bill will repeal the 1972 European Communities Act, which took Britain into the EU and meant that European law took precedence over laws passed in the UK Parliament. It will also end the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice but even the latter may still apply to European migrants still living in the UK.
All existing EU legislation will be copied across into domestic UK law to ensure a smooth transition on the day after Brexit.
The government says it wants to avoid a "black hole in our statute book" and avoid disruption to businesses and individual citizens as the UK leaves the EU.
The UK Parliament can then "amend, repeal and improve" the laws as necessary.
Ensuring the continuity of EU rules and regulations is also meant to aid trade negotiations with the EU because the UK will already meet all of its product standards.
What difference will this make to health and safety? Not much, at least to start with but it does give the government the opportunity to change laws including health and safety laws, independently of the EU. Although many H&S laws were already in place before we joined the EU.
Recycler’s director sentenced and company fined £500k for fatal telehandler strike
A waste collection and recycling service company has been fined £500,000 and the director threatened with jail sentence after a worker has sustained multiple injuries when he was hit by a reversing telehandler. He was struck during crossing the work yard at the company’s recycling site and sadly later died in hospital.
Brighton Magistrates’ Court was told on 12 October that United Grab Hire had no adequate segregation measures, such as walkways or crossing points in areas where pedestrians were most likely to be present at its site in Horley, East Sussex.
Health and Safety Executive (HSE) inspector Russell Beckett has told IOSH Magazine that there was “a culture of pedestrians mixing with large vehicles” at the recycling site, where waste from large utilities was being processed
“There was CCTV [footage] of this incident [on 7 July 2016] and we also looked at the 24 hours before the incident. We noted that there were numerous near-misses in terms of pedestrian and vehicle manoeuvres. [Workers] were walking right through the middle of the yard while heavy goods vehicles, shovel loaders and telehandlers had been reversing.”
The HSE investigation had also found that United Grab Hire did not train the driver of the telehandler to operate the vehicle.
United Grab Hire pleaded guilty to breaching ss 4(1) and 17(1) of the Workplace (Health and Safety Welfare) Regulations. The firm also must pay £5,968 costs.
Director Mark Howard pleaded guilty to breaching s 37 of the Health and Safety at Work Act. He was jailed for six months, suspended for two years.
Beckett said there were no aggravating factors. United Grab Hire had co-operated fully with the investigation, had no previous convictions and improvement measures had been put in place after the accident.These included segregated walkways, limits on the amount of vehicles entering the site, and a one-way system to assist vehicles to manouvre safely.
Hand Arm Vibration fined nearly £161,000
Wrexham County Borough Council has been prosecuted after 12 employees were found to have contracted hand-arm vibration syndrome (HAVS). The authority took no notice of its own regulations on monitoring employees vibration exposure while using hand-held power tools, such as lawn mowers , leaf blowers and strimmers.
A 57-year-old worker who was part of the council’s “streetscene” department, which is responsible for refuse and recycling collections, road clearing, grass cutting and highway maintenance, was diagnosed with HAVS in September of 2015.
During the investigation, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that the council had several policies dating back to 2004 to tackle the risk of HAVS, but had not put them into practice.
The HSE also found that the council had not addressed the issue of HAVS after an audit was done in February of 2011 had identified its failure to assess the risk to employees from vibration.
After Wrexham County Borough Council brought in health surveillance for vibrating tool users, a further 11 people were diagnosed of HAVS or carpal tunnel syndrome.
It pleaded guilty to breaching s 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act. At Flintshire Magistrates’ Court, District Judge Gwyn Jones had said the starting point for the fine was £400,000 but was reduced to £150,000 due to the council’s guilty plea and “other factors”, Daily Post North Wales reported. It was also ordered to pay £10,900 in costs.
After the hearing HSE inspector Mhairi Duffy had said: “This employee now suffers from a long term, life changing illness. The council should have therefore implemented the policy they devised following the audit during 2011.”
Copy-out permit allowed Stanlow tank explosion and £117,000 fine
Workers who cut through a pipe at Stanlow Oil Terminal in the cheshire region and caused an explosion in an oil treatment tank had been issued a permit to work copied from the previous week’s, though the hazard profile had changed, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) said.
ESL Fuels, which owned the lower-tier COMAH site at Ellesmere Port where it manufactured fuel products, was fined £100,000, with costs of £17,000 awarded to the HSE, at Liverpool Crown Court due to the incident.
In January 2015, waste oil contaminated with cobalt was being cleaned and converted into a clean energy source inside a 6 m-tall vessel (T 227) at the company’s North Blend Tank Farm. Nitric acid had been added to remove the cobalt impurities and this caused the waste oil to begin to foam and overflow from the tank and into a bund.
To prevent a potentially catastrophic overpressure in the tank, ESL installed relief pipework to connect the tankl to an emergency dump tank (T 187) to collect the overflowing foam. T 187 did not have a vent system however and combustible gas had built up inside the pipework and secondary tank, creating a flammable atmosphere.
On 19 January, two contract workers were inside the North Blend Tank Farm replacing existing pipework as part of a refurbishment project. They used an angle grinder to cut the pipework that connected the two tanks which was still in operation and not isolated.
The sparks given off from the grinder ignited the combustible gas inside T 187. Nobody was injured by the explosion but the tanks lid had become detached and landed on a walkway.
The HSE’s investigation found that the risk assessment and method statement submitted by the contractor – and checked by ESL – were not inadequate and subsequently formed the basis of the insufficient permit-to-work, which had been copied from one prepared previously, the week before.
The issuer had signed-off the permit that stated hot work would be carried out in the bund of T 227, where the ongoing waste oil treatment process was taking place, the HSE had found.
HSE inspector Matt Lea said: “The contractor submitted a risk assessment and method statement for the refurbishment work but the [waste oil treatment] process configuration was changed, as was the route of the pipework. Much of this information had been communicated verbally which provided scope for any uncertainty and misunderstanding.
“So you’ve got a live process going on at the same time as refurbishment works which is not being safely controlled”. There were ignition sources being brought into the area which have been accepted and ticked on the permit-to-work by ESL’s issuer.”