Warning over ‘bottom-up’ HSE inspections

Dave Dyer, senior consultant at ABB Consulting, says the HSE has shifted its focus to start explicitly testing competency, which focuses on the competence of individuals relative to safety and the safety culture of an organisation rather than just the systems in place.

He says HSE’s new ‘bottom-up’ approach will closely examine the way an organisation’s most hazardous processes are completed on a day-to-day basis. He has warned that a failure to demonstrate competency will lead to a full and time-consuming HSE safety audit being carried out and he has urged companies to ensure their safety procedures are watertight.

"We now have a recognition from the HSE that, often, when things do go wrong, people are somewhere behind it. Human error is by far the most frequent cause of loss-of-containment events,” said Dyer.

"Competency testing was previously only ‘implicit’ as part of HSE checks, but there is a far greater focus on it now. The aim is to improve safety, not to catch companies out, but I fear many could be under-prepared for this new attitude.”