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In 2022/23, 10% of fatal accidents on construction sites involved people being struck by a moving vehicle. Construction is one of the deadliest injuries in the UK with a fatal injury rate of 1.72 per 100,000 workers – around 4.2 times higher than the all-industry rate. How is this still an issue in our modern safety-conscious world?

Natalie Sherborne, Product Development Manager at NEBOSH, believes it could be down to a lack of awareness on the behalf of the employer as to what they need to put in place.

“There is legislation in place that ensures you have safe access and egress, which includes vehicles entering construction sites and making sure pedestrians have safe walkways” she says. Furthermore, Section 18 of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 state that every workplace shall be organised in such a way that pedestrians and vehicles can circulate in a safe manner.

The planning stage of a construction project is crucial. Says Natalie, “As part of the planning stage there should be a construction phase plan – that's where the principal contractor, the principal designer, the client, and other people involved in the project should all be working together and understanding what's going to be put in place. They need to know what hazards there will be and ensure that segregation is fully covered under the risk assessment and what they need to do to make sure people are kept safe. A lot of companies now use building information modelling (BIM) systems – a 3D space in which you can plan out exactly what's going on the site, so you can see exactly where your construction vehicles are going to go, where they're going to enter and exit, and where you are likely to have people. There's a lot you can do at the planning stage, to make sure that you reduce the risks as much as possible.”

The HSE advises that segregating pedestrians from vehicles, preferably by making routes entirely separate, is the most effective way of protecting them. Pedestrian traffic routes should ideally correspond to the paths people would naturally follow when walking across a site (often known as ‘desire lines’). Good examples of complete segregation include footbridges or subways, particularly where traffic volumes are very high.

Lewis Hunt, HSQE Manager at Soilfix Limited, firmly believes in the importance of getting things right from the start.
“For me, it's stripping it back to the planning stage,” he says. “It's about having time to go to the site, walking around and seeing the pinch points. Where are the danger areas? Storage, deliveries, and site security are the big three. You must keep it simple, and keep it enforced. Our inductions include site rules, one of which is not to interfere with fencing or barriers without talking to the site manager.”

“It's about influencing people,” he continues. “Most of the time, it’s all about decision making. People know the right way to behave, and the correct procedures, but we all take shortcuts. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an individual in an unsafe situation – within the swing radius of a machine, or within the reversing area of a dump truck, for example. And that mentality is never going to go away. People are always going to do what they want rather than walking the extra ten metres to the designated crossing.”

Indeed, you can have all the procedures in place and all the right areas segregated off, but people are still going to take shortcuts and end up where they shouldn’t. How do you account for human behaviour?

Says Natalie:
“It all comes down to training. It's making sure that workers are aware of where the safe crossing points are and where they are allowed to go. You can do a lot in terms of controls to try and ensure people work within a certain area, such as putting barriers in place to block entry into a dangerous space. A lot of it's around awareness – making people aware of the risks so they don't think, ‘Oh, I'll just nip across there, take a quick shortcut’, not realising that a forklift truck might be reversing down that path right that minute.”

Adds Lewis:
“We can tell people what to do, and we can demonstrate good practice. We can share horrible videos with hard hitting information, but you need to understand how this translates to the actual project. We always start out with a project handover, and we go over the plans – this is the logistics, here’s the site layout, there's the entrance, there’s the car park, here’s where we’ll put the welfare huts. And we’ll have plans for the fencing and the barriers to make sure people are segregated from the plant.”

So, training is important. And so is experience. Being able to see things working in practice will help change behaviours.

Says Natalie:
“What the The Health and Safety Management for Construction qualification (CN) does is make sure people understand both what they can do about the vehicles themselves, and how they interact with people. So, it's about making sure reversing signals are working so that they're clearly obvious to pedestrians on site. It talks about the importance of good lighting so you can see vehicle access routes. It teaches how you can keep your pedestrians safe, including putting in walkways and safe crossing points and implementing exclusion zones for vehicles.”

Says Lewis:
“As part of a safety stand down one time we talked about blind spots in heavy plant. People just assume the operators of these trucks have got 360-vision because they've got cameras but if you're not looking at the eight-inch monitor in the corner – which you shouldn't be doing because you're driving a massive machine – you don't know this person's right by your cameras, in the crush zone.

“So, we created some safe zones on one of our sites and parked up a digger, a dumper and a roller, and we got people who don't drive these vehicles, so weren’t familiar with their layout, to sit in the machine and experience it. It was stationery and safe, but they had the opportunity to see where the blind spots were and to appreciate how difficult it is for the drivers to remain productive whilst their colleagues are on foot running around, not looking where they’re going. After that we did a toolbox talk on plant segregation and talked about the challenges for these operators. That went a long way.”

Keeping people safe on site is the number one priority in construction – but in order for projects to remain profitable this needs to be done in an efficient and timely manner so that conflicting needs and priorities don’t get in the way of best practice. The issue of people and vehicle segregation shouldn’t still be a matter of life and death, and planning and training are two key ways to make sure sites – and the people working on them – are kept safe.

Sources:
https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/assets/docs/construction.pdfhttps://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1992/3004/regulation/17/made
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1974/37/section/2
https://www.hse.gov.uk/workplacetransport/separating.htm
https://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/priced/hsg136.pdf
https://www.nebosh.org.uk/qualifications/health-and-safety-management-for-construction-uk/