SafeContractor - the final instalment

Firstly, apologies for recent lack of blogging. My father died unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago. I am now back in action, and with plenty to blog about.

We finally said goodbye to SafeContractor in August. They were still trying to get us to use an overly wordy, repetitive and therefore ineffective Health and Safety Policy document. Plus a whole load of other issues, very similar to those we first came up against when this whole fuss started. The H&S policy was just the first thing on their list, and when we failed to persuade them that ours was much better (being clear, concise, not repetitive, and still covering all the key points) I decided enough was enough and we simply wouldn't ever convince them that their materials are (in our opinion) less safe than our own.

Here, if you are interested, is their super-long Health & Safety Policy sample. And here is our version (in draft form - the one we actually issue to staff is much prettier).

Despite being far, far longer, I really don't think there is anything substantive in theirs which is not in ours. Or at least, nothing sufficiently important to warrant the inevitable loss of clarity that would result from extending the length of the document.

Plus their sample is horribly let down by what I can only assume is a drafting error in the very first two clauses (which are almost identical).

Here is the letter I wrote to SafeContractor informing them of our decision to withdraw from their accreditation programme (copied into the HSE):

John Kinge
National Britannia Group Ltd
Britannia House
Caerphilly Business Park
Caerphilly
CF83 3GG


Dear John,

Thank you for your e-mail of 1st August.

We do very much appreciate the work that you and your colleagues have put into reviewing our SafeContractor accreditation. It is a credit to your organisation that you have paid so much attention to our very detailed concerns.

Nevertheless, we cannot escape the fact that we have very different views on managing health and safety. We think that long, repetitious documents with redundant information are dangerous as they are not read properly, the really important information gets lost amongst less important information, and they give the reader the impression (whether justified or not) of being part of a bureaucratic box-ticking exercise.

In our discussions you have indicated that you agree with these principles (of keeping documents concise, readable, relevant etc.). But, in practice, you give far less weight to these principles than we do, to the extent that those principles are completely overshadowed by the competing principle of including as much information as possible, even if it is of minimal importance, or repetitive.

I think that the first two clauses of your sample H&S Policy template are very telling:

“1.1 The Company acknowledges and accepts its legal responsibilities for securing the health, safety and welfare of all its employees, of subcontractors working on its behalf and all others affected by their activities.”

“1.2 The Company recognises and accepts the general duties imposed upon the company as an employer under the Health and Safety at Work Act and subsequent health and safety regulations appertaining to it’s [sic] operation.”

Clause 1.2 says nothing substantive that clause 1.1 does not say. While you might see this redundancy as a trivial drafting error, I think that the fact that such obvious repetition has found its way into the very first section of your sample template says a lot about the (lack of) importance given to producing a concise, readable, effective document. Clearly no-one has read through this document, thinking “Can we make this shorter and clearer? Can we make the key messages more prominent?” etc. No document (whether relating to health and safety or not) would be produced by our organisation without that sort of attention to detail. To you, attention to detail seems to mean “have we covered everything?” To us, attention to detail means “is this document as effective as possible?”

I should emphasise again that we are not rejecting your approach because we want to reduce paperwork, or that we see paperwork per se as burdensome. We are rejecting it because we think it is less safe. We firmly believe that our health and safety documents help foster a safer working environment than we would have if we followed your approach. We therefore no longer wish to seek renewal of our SafeContractor accreditation.

We will continue to work independently to further improve our materials and processes, including taking into account Jim Neilson’s and Steve Pointer’s comments about more formally documenting the process we have gone through to produce the employee-facing material that we use.

Thank you again for the time and effort you have put into this.


Yours sincerely,




Bruce Greig
Managing Director

Customer feedback - should we include negative comments on the website?

Seem to have ironed out most teething problems on the website. Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed we have improved the display (and number) of customer comments on the "What our customers say" page. This page is slightly controversial, as we deliberately include some mildly critical comments here. Some people think I am mad to do this - but I prefer to credit our customers (and potential customers) with a modicum of intelligence. While a long list of glowing comments does look good, I think it looks even better when we include some negative comments. It shows that we (and our handymen) are human and do make mistakes sometimes. And I think it adds credibility to the positive comments. Someone taking the time to read the website in this much detail (you have to look quite hard to find the critical comments, there aren't many of them) is smart enough to understand that a company can't be perfect every time (although we do try).

For me, hearing the negative comments about a product helps enormously when deciding whether or not to purchase the service or product. If I saw, for example, a review on Amazon about a blogging book saying something like "I really didn't like this book, it was much too simplistic, really only suitable for those that know nothing about blogging" I'd probably buy it, as that is exactly the sort of book that I need at the moment! That review gives me a brief insight from a slightly different point of view, and that is very valuable.

In a similar vein, about a year ago, we were offered some quite expensive Health & Safety consultancy advice. I was very taken with the service on offer: it would have allowed us to devolve all day-to-day H&S legwork to an outside firm of experts, and seemed to be very good value. The salesman was very keen to emphasise that a large proportion of their customers renewed the service after the initial 3-year contract. But while the renewal rate was high, it was not actually 100%, and I was very interested to find out why some people didn't renew. It seemed such a good service that I couldn't believe that companies wouldn't renew once they had experienced it.

So I asked the salesman if he could give me contact details of a few people who had not renewed. I could then find out if any of their reasons might be relevant to us (I was hoping they wouldn't be.). But the sales guy wouldn't do this: he was happy to give me contact details of people who were obviously big fans, but they probably wouldn't be able to tell me much I hadn't already found out. I already knew lots of reasons why the service was good. I wanted to know what I was missing - what was it that stopped people renewing.

Had I been able to speak to some of those non-renewing customers, I probably would have bought the service. But I didn't - I was worried that I was missing something (if the service was as good as the sales guy claimed, *everyone* would renew) so we looked for another solution to improving our H&S management. In the end we got the Health & Safety Executive themselves involved through their Workplace Health Connect programme, which was excellent and free, and allowed us to completely overhaul our H&S manual and other paperwork. But that's another story. We probably would have just gone for the consultancy service, and not bothered looking any further, had I been able to get a full 360-degree view of their business from talking to a full range of their customers.

So that's what I am trying to do with our customer comments page: allowing potential customers to get a rounded picture of what our service offers.

I'd like to take this one step further, but I am not sure I am brave enough: I'd like to publish, in full, the handful of written complaints we have received (together with our responses and further correspondance). This is a bit trickier, as any situation which has gone so pear-shaped as to prompt the customer to actually write to us is inevitably a very complex situation, and there is a risk that we couldn't effectively communciate the full detail of what happened / didn't happen which led to the problem and triggered the complaint.

But I'd still like to do it: it's a bit like EasyJet publishing their weekly punctuality stats. Sure, it shows that some planes are late, but everyone knows that really. Even just the act of publishing the stats implies that their punctuality must be good, otherwise (you presume) they wouldn't dare publish it. And it reassures the customer that the company is honest and open. That TV series which featured EasyJet, (was it called "Airline"?), is the same sort of thing. Would a traditional, "corporate" business like BA have allowed such unfettered access to its day-to-day life? That programme showed all sorts of things going wrong, but it also showed what caused those problems and (most importantly) how the staff dealt with them.

(Just checked EasyJet's website: no sign of punctuality stats anywhere! Curious. Have they stopped publishing them? If anyone knows when or why, please do let me know)

So, I still need a bit of persuading on this, but I do think some potential customers, those who are really researching in depth, would value seeing even detailed complaints on the website, so they can see how we handle things when things don't go exactly to plan.

HSE responds on SafeContractor

Jim Neilson of the Health & Safety Executive has responded with a thoughtful and detailed letter regarding our disagreement with National Britannia and our SafeContractor renewal. (see earlier posts)

He broadly agrees with our position, saying that "health and safety should be about practical actions that make a difference, and not paperwork for its own sake."

He advises me that a colleague will raise this issue with National Britannia, and draw their attention to what the HSE considers to be sensible risk management. And they will write to me again advising me of the outcome of those discussions within a month.

Which I think is very good of them, top marks to HSE, zero marks so far to National Britannia.

I note in passing that if you Google "safecontractor renewal", you get my blog at #1 spot, with SafeContractor's own site some way down the search results. And even just Googling "safecontractor" has me at #5 or thereabouts.

National Britannia SafeContractor vs HSE Workplace Health Connect

As mentioned in previous post we are having some trouble renewing our National Britannia SafeContractor accreditation after revamping our Health & Safety procedures under guidance from the Health & Safety Executive (under their oddly-named "Workplace Health Connect" programme).

We think our new H&S stuff is great: concise and effective. National Britannia basically want us to reinstate all the pages and pages of guff we used to have, which no-one ever read, but which tick all of NatBrit's boxes. But managing safety should be about reducing risk, not ticking boxes.

Here is an example: click here to see the sort of waffle NatBrit would like us to say about working at height. Over 1,000 words of guff.

Now click here to see our version. 150 words of clarity.

Which is more likely to get our handymen to be careful with ladders?

(Ironically, the HSE themselves contract NatBrit to manage their H&S advice line. I've told NatBrit and Workplace Health Connect about this whole palava, hopefully they'll fight it out amongst themselves and our concise, clear, safe documentation will win the day.)

Elf n' Safety

I mentioned elf n' safety in my previous post (about how we re-jigged our H&S paperwork with the assistance of the HSE through their "Workplace Health Connect" programme).

The upshot of the re-drafting was that we turned our 100+ page A4 H&S manual into an 11 page filofax insert to issue to all our handymen.

Why did we previously have such a huge H&S manual? Because we had written a risk assessment and "method statement" for pretty much every conceivable situation. We thought we had to do that, but I had for a long time thought that such thoroughness was counterproductive: if you give an employee a 100 page document to read, he probably won't read it, or if he does he is unlikely to remember much about it.

And if you issue to people a document about which they are generally dismissive (which they would be if it told them how to safely change a lightbulb), you risk making them generally dismissive about all safety issues, which is bad.

In reality (we think) there are a small handful of potentially dangerous situations that our handymen are exposed to. And our new H&S material focusses purely on those situations, with a simple one-page risk assessment about each one, plus real-life examples of where our own handymen have incurred injuries doing those tasks.

A graphic description of Patrick's hand after he sliced it with a Stanley knife is a lot more effective than burying a warning about sharp implements somewhere amongst hundreds of pages of waffle about elf n' safety.

Every additional bit of information you add to a document inevitably reduces the impact of existing bits of information. So if you add a risk assessment about a lightbulb, you reduce the impact of the (more important) risk assessment about working at the top of a ladder. And if you add dozens and dozens of risk assessments about relatively trivial risks, the really important stuff is completely drowned out by the noise.

Why am I blogging about this?

Because, this week, our National Britannia Safecontractor accreditation renewal was delayed because their assessors didn't like our new (shorter, focussed, safer) risk assessments. They gave us an example of what they think a risk assessment should say (several hundred words, small print, lots of superfluous and redundant wording); and I think they think we should have more than the half-a-dozen or so that we have.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out: there is no way that I am going to revert back to our previous H&S manual. But of course National Britannia will want to cover their backs: as far as they are concerned the more paperwork we show them the better, I would imagine. So will they listen to what I (and HSE) say? Will I persuade them that our new H&S manual is a million times more effective (=safer) than the reams of waffle they would probably rather we produced?

FSB red tape myths

The FSB (that's the Federation of Small Businesses not Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti) keeps bandying around this figure that owners of small businesses spend an average of 28 hours a month filling in forms for the Government. Google helpfully finds me nearly 50 FSB press releases citing this statistic.

But I think it is codswallop.

28 hours a month is nearly one whole day a week. There is no way we (let alone me personally) spend a whole man-day a week filling out regulatory paperwork. What can all these forms that other businesses are filling out possibly be? Here are the tasks we do which involve some sort of statutory "paperwork":

Payroll
The additional statutory burden of administering payroll is practically zero. We'd have to check everyone's hours, number of jobs they'd done, etc. even if we weren't also deducting payroll taxes on behalf of the government. The calculation of payroll taxes takes milliseconds because, like everyone else, our accounting software (QuickBooks) does it for us. Although maybe there are people out there who still calculate payroll deductions manually? It was only last year I think that the Inland Revenue finally stopped sending us a big book of tax and NI deductions every April. They really did send this huge series of tables where you could look up in one column what you were paying someone, and then look across to another column how much tax and NI you should deduct. I mean, really, why would anyone in their right mind ever bother doing that, when payroll software is practically free (I think we pay a princely £70 a year to keep our QuickBooks payroll tables up to date, plus a few hundred quid every few years to buy the newer version of QuickBooks itself).

Once a year, we "fill out" (i.e. print) P35/P14 forms, but there is zero, zero, zero paperwork required during the year - we just send the cash to HMRC once a month (OK, so that takes 5-10mins to check the amount, go online, send the payment). I probably spend maybe 1-2 hours preparing our annual return (which consists of getting QuickBooks to prepare the figures, me check them over, then instruct QuickBooks to zap them over to the HMRC website, and er, that's it).

So that's, say, 2 hours a year = 10 minutes a month, plus the 10 mins to send our monthly tax/NI pot to HMRC, so 20 minutes a month.

CIS Scheme (yes, I know, an example of RAS syndrome)
I do moan about this to anyone who will listen, but it doesn't really take that much time (to comply with, rather than to moan about). I moan because I dislike the fact that we and any subcontractors that we use are assumed to be fly-by-night tax avoiding scamsters unless we jump through a few hoops to prove otherwise, just because HMRC deems us to be operating in the "construction industry".

(CIS=Construction Industry Scheme. Basically a system whereby anyone operating in the "construction industry" claiming to be a subcontractor, not an employee, is assumed to be telling porkies unless they specifically prove otherwise. In practice if we pay an invoice from any small subcontractor -- whether an individual or a limited company -- we have to deduct 18% of it and send straight to HMRC, because HMRC assume said subcontractor is fiddling his taxes. Said subcontractor is of course not fiddling his taxes, and has to offset the deduction he has suffered against his true tax liability for the year).

For us, we have to fill out a little voucher each month summarising any payments we have made to subcontractors and pop them in the post to HMRC. This probably takes us 20 mins per month. The actual cash we deduct we just lump in with our real payroll taxes and pop that over to HMRC, so I have included the time taken to do that already. And even the monthly paper vouchers (which are a bit silly) are being abolished in April, and we'll only have to make a single annual return, just like we do for real employees.

So, at an extra 20mins for CIS (which will be nearly zero after this month) we are now at 40mins per month.

VAT return
I hear other SMEs really moan about this, but I just don't get it. As long as you are keeping accurate accounting records (and how can you run a business without them) filing your VAT return takes minutes. Our version of QuickBooks (2005 Pro) can't actually send the return directly to HMRC yet, we still have to type four numbers onto the HMRC website four times a year, but it really doesn't take a significant amount of time. Let's give it 30mins per quarter, 10mins per month, taking us to 50mins per month in total.

Annual Accounts
Spend a fair bit of time on this, but not to satisfy any regulatory requirement really. I'd want my accounts to show a "true and fair" picture whether or not I had to submit them to Companies House. Indeed, the version we actually submit to Companies House is far simpler than the version we use for internal management purposes (note I'm saying simpler not different. The two versions are of course based on the same figures, but we only have to file a summary balance sheet to Companies House, whereas we have a detailed P&L and a detailed balance sheet for our management accounts. Plus a stack of fancy metrics churned out from our super-dooper schedule / job / customer management software).

And our Corporation Tax return is based on pretty much the same figures, with a few adjustments (some small bits of expenditure we'd consider to be business expenses while taxman doesn't; depreciation becomes capital allowances; etc.). I suppose our accountants maybe spend a couple of hours a year on those bits. Let's allow them a half-day, four hours, 20 mins a month.

Then we have a bit of health & safety stuff. Very little time required on a regular basis, occasional few minutes filling out the Accident Book, a few more minutes, maybe half-hour, going on line to report the rare accident that requires a RIDDOR notification, annual review of our "stuff" for which I'd generously add an hour a month, maybe two if we really went to town on our annual review and spend a few man-days on it (like we did last year, see posts passim).

So I'm at something like 3 hours a month, and I just can't see how I could get to 28 hours a month. Are we missing something? Is there some huge raft of paperwork that everyone else is completing which we are just missing?

I think this whole red tape thing is mostly a myth, perpetuated by business lobby groups (I'm sure FSB is not the only one) and other businesses. Certainly some specific industries (waste management? farming? food preparation? house builders?) do have much larger regulatory burdens. Would that be enough to skew the average so heavily? FSB's stat is presumably the mean figure from some survey. Maybe the median would be more meaningful if there are some sectors massively burdened by red tape while the majority are not?

But you have to have some regulation to keep the real charlatans and scamsters in check. Are there any developed countries with less red tape than us? I doubt it. United States certainly regulates SMEs more closely, mainland Europe too. South East Asia? Not sure. Australia / New Zealand? Building regulations are certainly more onerous (e.g. re-tiling your bathroom requires a "waterproofing certificate"), don't know much about business regulation generally down there.

(On a non-business note, I am also a paraglider pilot. Paragliding in the UK is almost completely self-regulated, the CAA basically leaves it to the British Hangliding and Paragliding Association to make sure its members are trained and fly sensibly. I don't think any other countries do this. Certainly Germany and France have proper legal requirements to fulfill before you can throw yourself off a hill with a glorified parachute on your back, similar to what you'd need to fly a real plane)

We should be celebrating the fact that the UK runs so well, with such limited bureaucracy. By constantly harping on about "red tape strangling business" I think the FSB et al are being counter-productive. A civil servant contemplating some new regulation is going to think, hey, if these guys are already doing 28 hours a month of red-tape-complying, what difference will it make if my new regulation adds an extra half-hour or so? But if he thinks we are just doing 3 hours a month, then an extra half-hour is a huge increase and, maybe, Mr Civil Servant will just shelve his regulation, or work harder to make it less burdensome.

More on Health & Safety

Finally spoke in detail to the auditor at National Britannia who is responsible for our Safecontractor renewal.

Had a predictable discussion about how, yes, they need to see thousands of words of guff, and no, our safe, concise, effective new materials just won't do. We spoke in some detail about using sharp tools, as an example. We have a single generic risk assessment about using sharp blades. Copy here. Basically reminds you to secure the workpiece (less chance of slipping), keep yourself out of harm's way (so if you slip you don't cut your hand off), wear gloves (so if you do slip, and somehow slip blade onto hand, injury reduced somewhat).

But that's just not enough for NatBrit. They want to see a separate risk assessment for every job where you might be using a sharp blade, plus a method statement to describe the steps to take to perform that task. So one risk assessment plus one method statement for cutting a carpet tile; one for opening a package; one for cutting into plasterboard, etc. And then (although I think he was just getting carried away here, and he can't have really thought this through) they also want risk assessments for permutations of tasks (e.g. cutting into plasterboard while also up a stepladder). Not sure how good our man is at arithmetic, but if you had risk assessments for every job and every combination of jobs, you really would have a book full of worthless guff.

So, I have written to Jim Neilson, who is the man at HSE responsible for the Workplace Health Connect programme (through which we produced our new materials); copying in Geoffrey Podger (HSE Chief Exec) and Lord McKenzie of Luton (Minister responsible for the HSE).

Copy of my letter is here.

Firemen banned from climbing ladders?

Strange story in press last week about firemen being banned from installing smoke detectors in people's homes as it involves climbing stepladders.

Shock, horror, health & safety gone mad, Daily Mail up in arms, etc. etc. Except there is nothing at all in the Working at Height Regulations that would prevent a fireman climbing a stepladder to install a smoke alarm.

Yet Sean Starbuck, regional chairman of the FBU, is quoted saying:

"The use of stepladders to fit smoke alarms contravenes working-at-height regulations".

This is utter tripe. Was he misquoted? Or has he simply never bothered to find out what the Working at Height Regs actually say?

It wouldn't have taken him, or any of the journalists reporting this story, long to check. The Working at Height Regs have a short section all about ladders, and basically say they are fine as long as they are the most appropriate device for the task (e.g. if risk of fall is low; and task duration is very short). Fitting a smoke detector is certainly a short duration task; and a fireman, who climbs ladders for a living, is probably pretty good at not falling off them.

This sort of thing really gets my goat - and continues to portray the HSE as meddling fools trying to eliminate every possible risk from day-to-day activities, which on the whole they probably aren't. Why do they not rebut this sort of nonsense? Surely they must read the same story? Do they just sit in their offices fuming about how they have been misrepresented again?

OK, I did just find this buried on the HSE's website:

http://www.hse.gov.uk/press/record/var180107.htm

So they did try and rebut it, but clearly without effect. I just Googled a couple of sentences from that rebuttal, and it appears nowhere other than HSE's own site, so I guess no paper bothered to print it. And if they did, would just be on the letters page, not in the news where the original misleading story appeared.

The HSE makes their job so much harder by not effectively challenging this sort of stuff. It's like the "Cry wolf" fable: if you think the HSE is constantly wittering about trivial risks, you won't believe them when they warn you about something that genuinely is dangerous.

Lord McKenzie responds on Health & Safety (sort of)

Lord McKenzie's office has responded to my letter about SafeContractor (see this post here, and also more background here and here), saying:

"Lord McKenzie read your letter and attachments with interest. He was pleased that your experience of working with colleagues on the Workplace Health Connect programme was successful, and wishes you success in the future."

Hmmm. Well, with the greatest of respect to His Lordship, he may well have read my letter (copy here), but clearly didn't get past the third paragraph.

A colleague has suggested that the best way to contact a Minister is via our MP, that way (apparently) you are assured of a more detailed response.