More than 100 businesses in Newcastle, England were visited in a recent crackdown on industrial estates by Health and Safety Executive and local council inspectors. On 14 occasions, they were so worried about what they saw, they issued an official “improvement notice” requiring action to be taken as a matter of urgency to prevent an accident occurring.A  further eight  improvement notices will also be issued should employers fail to address issues of concern.

Problems ranged from concerns about working at height, manual handling, lack of training for fork lift truck drivers, damaged racking and lack of appropriate ventilation systems  for controlling exposure to wood dust.

HSE Inspector Michael Bone said: “The kind of unacceptable practise we saw included people accessing upper storage areas with no precautions in place to prevent them from falling and being injured or even killed and not properly guarding dangerous parts of machines.

“The reality is that they are simply accidents waiting to happen but could be prevented by doing simple things such as  storing items at ground level,  or if they have to be stored at a height providing edge protection and  carrying out risk assessments and making sure that all dangerous parts of a machine are recognised and guarded.

“When we called in to some premises, we were able to offer advice there and then, but in more serious cases, we had to take the more serious step of issuing an improvement notice where the  relevant health and safety requirement had been broken.”

Inspectors were also on the look to see if landlords were meeting their obligations on industrial estates. Managing traffic came under close scrutiny.  Inspector Michael Bone continued:

“On some industrial estates we were appalled by what we saw.  Cars were parked on pedestrian walkways, there was no way of separating pedestrians from traffic - which can range from your typical white van to huge articulated lorries doing deliveries. It simply wasn’t acceptable, especially when transport is one of the major causes of  workplace accidents.”

Inspectors from the Health and Safety Executive and Newcastle City Council visited three industrial estates and 23 individual business in Newcastle, where three improvement notices were issued. They called in to 20 business on three industrial estates in North Tyneside and six improvement notices were issued.  Twenty seven business and three industrial estates in Gateshead received a visit with where 3 improvement notices were issued with a possible eight to follow, and three industrial estates and 33 business were inspected in South Tyneside  and two improvement notices were issued.