Health, safety and welfare in construction plant operations
This domain tests the legal and organisational controls that sit behind every hour in the seat: the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, CDM 2015, PUWER, risk assessment and method statements, PPE, welfare and emergency arrangements. Questions ask what duty applies to you personally and what you would actually do when a control has failed.
Core rules
- HASAWA s.7 - take reasonable care of yourself and others affected by your acts or omissions, and co-operate with your employer. s.8 - never intentionally or recklessly interfere with or misuse anything provided for safety, including disabling a reversing alarm or removing an edge barrier.
- CDM 2015 - construction phase plan, site induction, traffic management plan separating plant and pedestrians, and Schedule 2 welfare: toilets, washing, drinking water, rest area, changing and drying facilities.
- Buried services (HSG47 approach) - utility drawings are indicative only. Use a cable avoidance tool and signal generator, hand-dig trial holes, and never machine-dig within 0.5 m of a confirmed service.
- PPE is the last line of defence, effective only when it fits, is compatible with others and is worn correctly.
- Emergency arrangements: muster point, first-aid cover, spill kit location and the site's accident and near-miss reporting route.
Worked example
You are trimming a trench batter with a 360 excavator. Drawings show a 400 mm gas main crossing at 900 mm cover. You stop, cross-check the plans against the CAT scan, obtain the utility's marked-up drawing and a permit, hand-dig the crossing and reposition a spotter. Reasoning: recorded cover depth is routinely wrong after previous site works, and a struck main is a life-threatening event, so the drawing alone is not evidence of a safe clearance.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating PPE as the control that prevents the accident rather than the final layer.
- Assuming a service drawing is accurate, or that the excavator bucket can "feel" a pipe safely.
- Quoting "report it to the supervisor" without saying stop, isolate and make the area safe first.
- Ignoring near misses because nothing was damaged.