‘Allowing visitors onto construction sites without addressing health and safety issues created risks for all parties present’ – Occupational Health and Safety Authority.
Visits to construction sites should not be allowed unless all arrangements are in place to ensure the safety of everyone on the site, according to the Occupational Health and Safety Authority (OHSA).
In a statement issued Monday, the OHSA said that allowing visitors onto construction sites without addressing health and safety issues created risks for all parties present.
“This includes situations involving estate agents taking potential clients onto sites still under construction, sometimes while works are being carried out,” the authority said. “This creates risks for all parties on site.”
OHSA said it was imperative to safeguard the health and safety of all persons on site, whether workers or not, and that this was the duty of the owner of the construction site, defined as ‘the client’ under Legal Notice 281 of 2004.
Moreover, it said, project supervisors needed to “take the steps necessary to ensure that only authorized persons are allowed onto the construction site”.
The granting of such authorization would imply that only persons with adequate protection could be allowed onto the site.
In the case of construction sites on which work is scheduled to last longer than 30 working days and on which more than 20 workers are occupied simultaneously, or on which the volume of work is scheduled to exceed 500 person days, the project supervisor was duty-bound to communicate in writing a prior notice to the OHSA at least four weeks before work commences, detailing a health and safety plan for the site.
Paul Cocks
