The grim prediction was made by Leighton Holdings general manager organisational strategy Stephen Sasse at an Infrastructure Partnerships Australia conference.

Sasse’s secret to preventing those deaths is not via awareness campaigns or in micro-management through overly prescriptive procedures of the type contained in the new national workplace safety framework.

It is through recognising and enshrining the vital contribution clients and designers can make to workplace safety.

In his speech, Sasse said the harmonised regulations were a rare opportunity to enshrine a simple set of construction design and management regulations into our law.

“If, as an industry, as regulators and as political leaders we do not take this opportunity, we will, through that omission, be responsible for the deaths of at least 50 construction workers a year by 2014,” he said.

“It is, as they say, a ‘no brainer’.”

Sasse’s former boss, deposed Leighton Holdings chief executive David Stewart, had gone public on the issue in April.

“We know that a significant proportion of construction safety incidents, possibly as high as 50 per cent of all traumatic injuries and fatalities, stem from failure to take account of occupational health and safety considerations at the design and procurement stage of a construction project,” Stewart said in a covering letter to Leighton’s submission to Safe Work Australia, the body responsible for devising the harmonised regulations.

“There is also compelling evidence that safety outcomes are very substantially and positively influenced by the direct involvement and commitment of clients to safe construction.”

In its submission, Leighton says the template for a set of effective, workable design and management regulations is readily available in the form of the UK’s Construction (Design and Management) regulations.

“This regulatory framework puts a specific set of obligations on clients and designers as part of the construction procurement chain,” Stewart said.

Sasse told the IPA conference that Safe Work Australia’s failure to specify design and management responsibilities was “unacceptable” because the UK system was a “tried and tested regulatory framework … and it works”

A Safe Work Australia spokesperson told Contractor that Leighton’s ideas had been considered but rejected.

“Leighton Holdings made a submission as part of the public comment process, including on the UK design and management framework,” the spokesperson said in an email.

“However, the Intergovernmental Agreement for Regulatory and Operational Reform in Occupational Health and Safety requires the model WHS regulations give effect to a policy framework for construction that is consistent with the National Standard for Construction Work.

“Consequently the UK design and management framework was not adopted in the model WHS regulations.”

Eliminating hazards at the design stage is one of five priorities at the centre of the National OHS Strategy, a plan endorsed by government, industry and unions in 2002 that resulted in a number of industry codes including the National Standard for Construction Work introduced in 2005.

Section 7.5 of the standard states: “Designers must ensure, to the extent that they have control over the design, that any risks to the health and safety of any person affected by the construction work, which includes the construction, repair, cleaning, maintenance or demolition of a structure, that are a result of the design, are eliminated, or where this is not reasonably practicable, minimised.”

Safe Work Australia’s draft harmonised regulations echo this language, requiring that safety risks “arising from the design during the construction work” must be “eliminated, so far as is reasonably practicable; or if it is not reasonably practicable to eliminate the risks, minimised so far as is reasonably practicable”. The maximum penalties for failing to do so are $1250 for individuals and $6000 for corporations.

While Leighton Holdings did not respond to our request for comment, in his IPA presentation Sasse welcomed the spirit of the harmonised regulations but said the new framework of duties based around the concept of a person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU) “fails to give effect to how those duties are to be managed”

“The harmonised framework will therefore have no positive effect on safety in our industry,” he said.

“The best we can hope for is that over a 10-15 year period the prosecution authorities and the courts slowly tease out a body of case law that creates a framework in which the various PCBUs in construction can effectively manage their obligations.

“This is unacceptable.”

The UK Construction (Design and Management) regulations were introduced in 1994 and revised in 2007.

According to regulator the UK Health and Safety Executive, “CDM 2007 places legal duties on virtually everyone involved in construction work … clients, CDM coordinators, designers, principal contractors, contractors, workers”

The CDM coordinator, appointed by the client, plays a central role in all “notifiable” projects – those taking more than 30 working days or that involve more than 500 person-days.

According to HSE the CDM coordinator’s role is to “coordinate health and safety aspects of design work” and to “facilitate good communication between the client, designers and contractors”

HSE says there are “a lot of misconceptions” about CDM and its effect on designers, including that it makes designers “stifle their creativity, limit their design freedom or place safety above aesthetics” and that it requires them to have a detailed knowledge of construction processes.

It does, however, demand that designers “need sufficient knowledge and experience of the construction process”

“[T]o discharge these duties a competent designer will … know what the potential hazards will be during the construction, maintenance, cleaning and dismantling of your design [and] satisfy themselves that there is at least onesafe way of constructing their design,” HSE says.

“If this involves seeking specialist advice,or working with a construction partner, then so be it.”

It’s a clear-cut system, Sasse says, and it works. He showed the conference audience a graph demonstrating how UK construction industry fatality rates have trended down as Australian rates have headed in the other direction.

“[T]ake a look at the trend – the same degree of variation as the Australian industry, but tracking in the right direction,” he said. Sasse said Leighton Holdings’ analysis of its workplace fatalities showed “that a significant proportion of construction industry fatalities could have been avoided if the construction risks had been considered earlier in the procurement process – that is, at the design and planning phases of the project”

He said it was a basic principle of risk management that higher order controls, which eliminate a risk or replace a risky procedure with a less risky one, are superior to lower order controls – those that rely on a procedure to manage the risk.

“This distinction is demonstrated domestically,” he said.

“If I am concerned about X-Box usage I can issue an instruction limiting the use of the X-Box, an administrative control, or I can put the controller in my pocket, an elimination control.

“Those of you who have faced this issue will be well aware of what actually works.”

Establishing higher order controls on a construction project can be challenging, Sasse said, not least because “the construction methodology is generally dictated by the design”

“This means that construction crews havean inordinately greater reliance on procedural and administrative controls than we might wish for, and therefore the consequent guaranteed risk of failure that accompanies reliance on lower order controls,” he said.

Sasse said an understanding of higher and lower order controls underlined his central point: “That a significant proportion of construction industry fatalities could have been avoided if the construction risks had been considered in the design and planning phases of the project”

This story first appeared in the December edition of Contractor magazinecolor>