Health & Safety Update | April 2020
The quarterly Health & Safety Update is designed to assist you in ensuring that you are thinking about topical health and safety matters on your farm or estate. Health and safety is a vital part of any business operation.
The harm caused to employees and the financial cost to employers due to accidents and incidents in the workplace is immense. This update examines the importance of incident investigation for preventing recurrence and looks at the drivers for and characteristics of a good investigation to inform long-term health and safety improvements.
As we are now in the Cross Compliance period for slurry spreading, we consider the suitable and sufficient fencing of slurry stores. We identify the dangerous gases produced by slurry, together with their patterns of release, as well as precautions for managing and entering below ground stores. We explain Safe Systems of Work as the next step after risk assessment, and their role in setting out how tasks should be safely and consistently completed. We provide an update on Coronavirus (COVID-19) before explaining the revisions to Workplace Exposure Limits published by the Health & Safety Executive in January 2020.
This update includes a case study of a recent prosecution after a Fedex employee was seriously injured when he was hit by a forklift truck. This serves as a reminder to the agricultural sector of the need to segregate vehicle and pedestrian traffic, particularly given the high number of fatalities last year as a result of being struck by a moving vehicle. Finally, we recap the requirements of the Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm (England) Regulations 2015 and the need to have at least one smoke alarm on every storey of let properties and a carbon monoxide alarm in any room containing a solid fuel burning appliance.
