HSE undertook the phased inspection initiative to evaluate and assess the role of local authorities when procuring and managing household waste and recycling contracts, or, where applicable, delivering and managing in-house recycling services.
According to HSE, 50% of the local authorities inspected contracted out all or part of their waste and/or recycling services. Inspections were not completed on only two of the 380 relevant councils due to “ongoing investigations”.
And, as reported by letsrecycle.com in October 2014 (see letsrecycle.com story), HSE issued 59 enforcement notices during the inspection period with regards to council waste and recycling services covering 14 topics, with the most common notices involving: risk assessment and route risk assessment; bin lift safety; noise assessment and control; reversing assistant training; transport safety; and monitoring.
The final report shows that the most common areas identified for improvement by inspectors are:
- monitoring and review of health and safety performance of service provider
- client and contractor monitoring the effectiveness of supervision
- risk assessment of activities (including route risk assessment)
- Elimination/reduction of reversing on routes
HSE now intends to repeat the three-year programme of inspection interventions with local authority waste and recycling collection services, starting in 2015/16.
WISH Forum
The publication of findings from the inspection initiative follows HSE’s waste industry event in Birmingham on November 27 2014, which saw 150 senior representatives from across the sector meet to discuss the poor health and safety record in waste and recycling.
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Organised in conjunction with the Waste Industry Health and Safety (WISH) Forum, HSE said the event “celebrated progress on delivering actions from the 2013 WISH Blueprint” (see letsrecycle.com story) as well as “identifying areas for future action, agreeing priorities and securing commitment to help bring about further change moving forward”.
Giving the keynote speech at the event, HSE chair Judith Hackitt said: “It is vital that you push on and all do your bit to make further progress. In particular, make a concerted effort to tackle those actions where progress has been slow. Keep setting yourselves challenging targets and play your part in raising health and safety standards in the industry.”
WISH has also announced plans to launch its own dedicated website, separate from HSE, this year, as well as publishing a new Blueprint for 2015 onwards.
Chris Jones, WISH chair and director of risk management and compliance at Cory Environmental, said: “After 13 years of tough, challenging, but ultimately very successful WISH work programmes, it was good to see the level of passion and enthusiasm that remains in the industry to take on the next set of challenges. As Machiavelli observed ‘Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great’.
“I’m looking forward to working through the outcomes of the workshop sessions to see what new challenges the industry is dedicating itself to overcome.”
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–HSE
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