Thankfully the days of climbing up the outside of the warehouse racking to pick orders or stacking three timber pallets on a forklift and raising up a colleague on this make-shift platform to change the strip lighting in the warehouse have well and truly been kicked into touch and rightly so, keeping the workplace safe is paramount so using the right scaffold access tower to do the job is very important in this article we at Action Handling will guide you through the work at height regulations so you don’t risk your own life or the lives of others.
If you are using any item of work at height equipment within the workplace including a scaffold access tower, either as an employee or self-employed person, the work at height regulations will apply to you. It is your responsibility to ensure that not only the person building the scaffold access tower is competent but also those who specify, use, manage, supervise the tower are competent to do so.
A competent person is a person that can demonstrate that they have adequate technical training and sufficient professional experience and the authority to enable that individual to carry out their assigned duties at the level of responsibility awarded to them.
This person should have the ability to understand any potential hazards related to the work scheduled to be carried out, pick up on technical defect or omissions that could potentially cause harm and proceed then to carry out actions to mitigate these to make the tower safe to use.
General rule of thumb to ensure basic guidelines are upheld for each procedure of work would be to carry out a proper risk assessment before you even start any work. The person is competent to build, dismantle, carry out a pre-use inspection on the tower and complete the necessary records in accordance with regulations.
The tower components themselves must be inspected at suitable intervals and appropriate records maintained and updated accordingly for inspections.
Never work on a platform without any guardrails
Never stand on an unprotected platform when building or dismantling
Always follow the manufactures or suppliers manual
Ensure the manual is available to the operatives erecting and using the tower and that everyone is clear on who is supervising the site or place of work
The tower conforms to EN1004, HD1004 OR BS1139
If you don’t have the manual – don’t use the tower simple as that.
Hopefully this article has been helpful and below is a link that will help you further more if you require an in-depth understanding of the working at height regulations and a selection of scaffold towers we supply.