Offshore Industry: Safety
(asked on 1st May 2018) - View Source
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to the Health and Safety Executive's (HSE)Helping Great Britain Work Well: Commitments document, published in November 2016, what the progress the HSE has made on each commitment to the safety of workers in the offshore (a) oil and gas and (b) renewables industries since the publication of that document.
The workforce engagement commitment made for Helping Great Britain Work Well (HGBWW) was made by Step Change in Safety through their Workforce Engagement Support Team (WEST). The commitment is to deliver improved training and understanding of the Elected Safety Representative role and functions. This is to be delivered through a new 4 staged approach to training:
Introduction to the Safety Rep role: “what good looks like for ESRs”, information to workers, supervisors, OIMs & Duty Holders/Employers
OPITO Training Review
Delivering Functions & Logbook
Further development and sharing experiences with new ESRs.
The OPITO Training Review (ii) has been completed. The three other stages require some further input from Step Change in Safety.
The renewable energy industry made a number of commitments to HSE as part of HGBWW. This included one from the G+ Global Offshore Wind Health and Safety Association (G+) (whose membership includes the majority of offshore wind farm operators and developers) to ensure the delivery of commitments the industry made at a HSE hosted event in November 2015. This included to provide the leadership to ensure that all the industry supply chain was fully engaged in developing and implementing industry good practice. It also included the provision of significant resource, including the appointment of dedicated full time staff to ensure a risk reduction programme was delivered:
On the 26 April 2018, HSE and G+ co-hosted an event with 56 industry leaders which concluded that good progress had been made with further work required to further improve engagement with the supply chain and amend the risk reduction programme to ensure new challenges are dealt with.
Other commitments met include Renewable UK’s development and delivery of guidance for emergency planning for the renewable energy sector which can be found at http://www.renewableuk.com/page/OREEF.