Nationwide Platforms’ Fish Challenges Access Industry to Sacrifice for Safety
Nationwide Platforms managing director Jeremy Fish urged the aerial work platform industry to always put safety first at the International Powered Access Federation Summit in Madrid, Spain, last week. Fish, who also performed a saxophone solo for his audience said “if resources are under pressure and you need to make sacrifices, you sacrifice something else other than safety.”
Fish told his audience that safety protects revenues, citing cases of how U.K. companies have paid £82 million in fines for safety breaches during the past five years, with several companies going out of business.
“What do you do to avoid compromising safety if you have to economize? Whatever it takes,” he said. “You don’t have to focus on equipment to be safe, you can focus on behavior. Safe behaviour doesn’t involve cost. Speak up when you witness something dangerous. Question, take ownership, share incidents and near-misses.”
Fish challenged IPAF members not to pay lip service to safety, saying that more member companies should report accidents involving aerial equipment at IPAF’s incident database at www.ipaf.org/incident.
“If you are really serious about safety, then why is it that so few of you have submitted near-miss reports to the IPAF accident reporting database since its inception four years ago?” he asked.
Fish also proposed that IPAF should raise standards by auditing new and existing members. “If you are really serious about safety, why do you let any MEWP provider organization join?” he asked IPAF. “Are you more interested in membership numbers and fees or driving safety standards? I think we should be auditing new and existing members, insisting that they uphold certain standards – standards that are worthy of the IPAF badge. Let’s not tolerate mediocrity and second best. My view is that if we can do these things, then safety surely will be our number one priority, in both good and bad times, and it will transform our industry.”
Next year’s IPAF Summit will be held April 4 in London. Presentations from the IPAF Summit are available at the Resources section of www.ipaf.org.
