HEALTH AND SAFETY IN THE LIVE EVENTS INDUSTRY

A recent industry roundtable forum held by Show Presentation Services (SPS) brought to light a plethora of issues concerning health and safety in the live events industry. Robin Coles, Managing Director at Show Presentation Services, reviews the issues that were raised in the forum.

The Health & Safety Executive states that there were 249 fatal injuries to workers and 27,477 major injuries to workers reported in 2001/2002. While many changes have occurred in the live events industry in order to comply with new health and safety legislation, these figures prove that it continues to be a hot topic across all industries.

Most of these cases are probably due to the fact that a high percentage of people don’t fully understand what their responsibilities are when it comes to health and safety. This isn’t surprising in the live events industry seeing as such a high percentage of workers are self employed freelance staff.

The transitory nature of the live events industry - the majority of work involves temporary structures – combined with a lack of industry recognised qualifications, means that it can be very difficult to ensure that the people you are working with are aware of their legal responsibilities and professional liabilities.

The difficulty is further complicated because while the end-client may know there is a need for health and safety issues to be addressed, they often don’t know exactly what is required, or they don’t realise that they have a responsibility to ensuring that legislation is adhered to. Whenever the question of liability is raised, there is an air of uncertainty about who is responsible and who isn’t. The reality is that health and safety legislation includes everyone involved in an event, from the event organiser, the venue, the production company, rental companies, sub-contractors and freelancers, to the delegates attending a conference or exhibition. Everyone ‘employed’ to be at an event is liable under the Act. The only people at an event who are not liable under health and safety law are members of the public.

Two years ago SPS started providing its members of staff with health and safety training, because full time staff were often going to smaller jobs on their own, accompanied by maybe one or two freelancers, and it was becoming absolutely essential to have at least one person on site who knew what the health and safety responsibilities were - how to manage potential accidents and reduce risk. SPS also extended the course to its end clients, which resulted in an overwhelming response. Clients are recognising that they need to be able to review their own adherence to the regulations, which means they have to understand them.

We are now beginning to see major end-client companies writing health and safety requirements into their briefs and tender invitations, with some of them saying that they will not be associated with suppliers that don’t have the appropriate health and safety credentials.

As an industry we are finding that everyone is starting to realise that we have to take health and safety seriously and give it more consideration than we have in the past, and that we have got to encourage education across the board, from freelance workers to end-client, to recognise their responsibilities. At SPS we feel that until it is standard practice, we have got to take responsibility for our employees working practices, because we are potentially liable for any incident involving our staff. We should also be working to ensure that our clients are not put in a position of liability, because there is no such thing as an accident anymore. Somebody is always responsible.

ENDS