School of hard knocks

In 1993, roofer Ian Whittingham stepped up from a gutter on to a roof and the roof collapsed. He recalls coming round nearly a day later in the spinal unit at Southport hospital. His back had been broken.

In 2008, Whittingham cuts an unusual figure on the pavement outside a Skanska site in the City of London. Several passing suits look twice at a man in a hard hat, fluorescent yellow jacket and wheelchair.

His role in Skanska’s education department is to teach people about safety, so that – unlike him back in ’93 – they understand the risks and can make informed decisions: ‘If you educate them, you give them half a chance,’ he says.

You may well recognise Whittingham’s face. He is something of an international superstar in construction health and safety videos. His role at Skanska, where he works part-time, is really his third career. His second career saw him working voluntarily with HSE, Bovis and Taylor Woodrow and many other firms, talking to people about his accident and its consequences and making safety induction videos, some of which have been translated into several languages.

When we meet, together with Skanksa’s environment, health and safety director Ben Legg, Whittingham is not keen to dwell on the accident, which happened when he was with another firm. He wants to talk about what he is trying to do now with Skanska.

When Legg offered him a job two years ago, Whittingham had to think long and hard: he hadn’t been employed since that day in 1993. ‘It was a big decision. The reason I joined Skanska was that I liked the people,’ says Whittingham, who says that the most enjoyable part of his role is meeting people and talking to them. ‘The guys I knew from Skanska treated me well.’

His role involves visiting sites around the country, training supervisors and others and talking to people out on site to hear their concerns – about safety and other issues – and to raise awareness. He still does voluntary talks on his days off.

‘He is an inspiring speaker,’ says Howard Prosser, chair of the Chartered Institute of Building’s health and safety advisory committee, who heard Whittingham talk recently.

To some, it would appear madness to employ someone in a wheelchair to visit sites. Legg admits it was difficult at first. ‘It’s really hard when first presented with the issue of Ian’s disability. You could go back to saying: “We can’t do it.” Well, if we can build structures like those we build round London, you can sure as hell get Ian into a site office.’

Many Skanska offices now have wheelchair lifts and tarmac on the access roads. Not only does this make Whittingham’s life easier but it helps with manual handling, he says: lifts can be used for moving furniture and better access roads means wheelbarrows can be used.

Even so, Whittingham’s presence is still a surprise to many: ‘Lads are quite shocked when I appear next to them on a roof or in a trench,’ he says with a grin.

Whittingham’s big push at Skanska has been to train the specialist contractors’ supervisors. ‘If you look at any construction company, the bigger ones don’t really build anything. They manage the process. The site is run by the trade contractors’ managers. To me the most important people on site are the frontline supervisors.’

Lads are quite shocked when I appear next to them on a roof or in a trench

Ian Whittingham

Two years ago, with two Skanska colleagues, he worked to put together a three-day IOSH-accredited training course, the first of its kind for the industry. Since then, Skanska has trained nearly 500 supervisors.

Ian’s view is that too often contractors expect their specialist to somehow know what is expected of them. ‘Our industry suffers from poor education,’ says Whittingham. ‘We are not the best at telling people what we want. We have to inform and educate these people. If you want people to work in a certain way, you have to let them know what it is.’

On the supervisors’ course, Whittingham and his colleagues educate people about what Skanska wants, what the legal implications of being a supervisor are and emphasise the fact that they have the right to say ‘no’. ‘It does work really, really well,’ says Whittingham.

Whittingham’s teaching technique involves a good deal of joking (‘If they are laughing, they are learning’), a lot of respect for the people he is teaching (‘The majority are really good lads; I have learned a lot from some of them’) and effective communication (‘We try and take stuff that is complicated and make it simple. We take the myth and fluffiness out of it’).

Legg is keen to emphasise early on in our meeting that he didn’t employ Whittingham because of his disability. ‘The reason I employed him was not because he is in a wheelchair, it’s about what comes out of his mouth.’

One of Whittingham’s strengths, says Legg, is his willingness to tell it like it is. ‘There is l

l not any political agenda with Ian,’ says Legg. ‘There is a rare honesty about what he does. And the only way we can get better is if we are honest. When I think we are getting there, Ian will say: “Do you really think so?” That honesty is appreciated and necessary.’

Another of Whittingham’s qualities is his ability to get on with anyone. As we walk around site and the canteen it’s obvious that people like chatting to him. ‘I can probably find out more about a project in half an hour than most people will find out in a week,’ he says matter of factly.

Then there’s a cheeky sense of humour. As he tells me the story of his accident, recounting how he stepped on to the roof which then collapsed, I ask: ‘So what happened next?’ He replies deadpan, but with a twinkle in his eye: ‘I hit the ground’.

Though he comes across as – and still is – one of the lads, Whittingham is more than a good listener, with a very personal understanding of what happens when sites aren’t safe. Over the years, he has studied for numerous health and safety qualifications. ‘I realised that if I was going to talk about this stuff, I really needed to know about it and understand the process’, he says. He’s still studying: this time for a Certificate of Education so that he can get his message across in the best way for each person.

Unlike some of its peer companies, Skanska does not have a behavioural safety programme as such. ‘We just do it,’ says Whittingham. ‘We don’t need some fancy name. It’s about doing what’s right.’

Legg adds: ‘It’s about four things: give people the processes or tools, tell them the sort of behaviour we want, which is respectful, honest and open, and provide the leadership. If you do all these really well, that’s the behaviour.’

I can find out more about a project in half an hour than most people can find out in a week

Ian Whittingham

Whittingham thinks that the danger of a behavioural safety programme is that it can become a standalone initiative. ‘The problem is sustainability’, he says. ‘Safety should not be a project, it should be a core value. My fear is that there is a possibility you will divert people’s attention from the fundamentals,’ he says. ‘Behavioural-based safety is a step forward, but it’s not the magic bullet.’

Whittingham believes that making sites safer really comes down to one simple thing: treating people properly. ‘Give people somewhere decent to work, decent welfare, somewhere they can have something nice to eat. Pay them a decent wage. Try and raise their expectations.’

Is it really that simple? ‘If people are happy, they are safer. I really believe that,’ says Whittingham. ‘Because they are more likely to think about what they are doing. If you treat people properly they are more likely to buy into what you are trying to teach them.

‘If you treat people poorly, how are they going to react? If you give them poor conditions to work in, they will act accordingly.’

Legg and Whittingham talk constantly about ‘raising expectations’. And perhaps one of the biggest expectations to tackle is that construction is a dangerous industry where deaths are bound to occur. ‘I think we are too ready to accept that people will be killed in construction,’ says Whittingham. ‘Every fortnight, three people are dying in construction. If there were three doctors going to work and dying in their surgeries or three school teachers dying at schools, there would be a national outcry.’

Another big idea is that messages about safety should be positive rather than negative. ‘It’s very easy to be really negative. I don’t think we get enough positive. It does not get you anywhere. That’s what I am trying to change,’ says Whittingham.

He admits that it is awkward to start walking round site praising people for using the right personal and protective equipment, say, or for doing something safely but adds that after you’ve done it the first time, it gets easier. ‘The reaction you get from someone depends on how you talk to them,’ he says. ‘Safety is always all about what’s gone wrong, not what’s gone right.’

But things do go wrong. On the day that CM met Whittingham and Legg, a story broke about the death of a PC Harrington employee who had died a few days after a fall from a ladder on a Skanska site.

To his credit, and in line with his declared principles of honesty and openness, Legg is happy to answer questions about the death, although he doesn’t want to go into specific details while investigations are under way. Usually such conversations would be overseen or taken over by a firm’s PR department.

I want to know how Skanksa handles the aftermath of such an event and how a death impacts on the drive to raise expectations. Legg explains that there is a formal process – how Skanksa handles both the HSE and internal investigations – and a moral or gut response. So on the day of the accident, Skanksa chief executive David Fison, together with Legg and two other senior executives, cleared their diary and went to site to support the team there.

‘The team come under extreme pressure,’ says Legg. ‘They are a bunch of human beings and they need support to make sure they get through it. Although they say that they are fine, the guys hurt.’

The idea that a fatality can occur even on a well-run, well-resourced site with safety-aware managers and safety-trained supervisors could be seen as depressing. For Legg, such incidents serve to strengthen his resolve. ‘It does affect me. It makes me more determined. It does not matter to me that people say I am a jobsworth. If everybody backs off, then you get carnage.’

‘It knocks you back for a while but then it makes me more determined than ever to try and stop it happening again,’ echoes Whittingham. ‘The main thing is that you have to move forward and make sure the same set of circumstances don’t occur again. And it reinforces how important education is.’ cm