Safety Up Top

With winter beginning to draw in, it’s the time when safety awareness becomes an even stronger focus point for those in the roofing and scaffolding business. It’s excellent news that 2016 was the fourth fatality-free year for members of the scaffolding trade body NASC, and we all hope 2017 will be equally successful.

Maintaining such good outcomes means constant reminders when it comes to safety with scaffold boards, and how, and where, to check that they are the right ones for the job. That’s where TFT Woodexperts comes in.

We run scaffold board refresher courses and introduction days, for companies large and small, in both scaffolding and roofing sectors. We are also called in by housebuilders when there’s a problem. Earlier this year a major developer called on our services to investigate a number of broken scaffold boards which appeared to carry a suitable independent verification mark. Tracking these back, we discovered that the licence number quoted did not exist with the verification body, underlining the necessity of continuous monitoring of boards as they arrive on site.

Scaffold boards can still be found today marked with the term ‘Grade A’. This is an outdated marketing misnomer and does not mean that the board has been graded as fit for purpose. Scaffold boards should be end-stamped with the British Standard number (BS2482) and either V (for a visually-graded board) or M (for machine-graded).

Already this year we’ve been making our contribution to 2017’s safety statistics by holding a number of scaffold board refresher and introduction courses, including one a few weeks ago, just prior to the Roofing Claddding & Insulation show. At each session we go through thoroughly scaffold board dimensions and materials, how to check boards for damage, and how to distinguish the supplier’s branding from the all-important grading marks and standards references which must be present.

Safety is top of our list, as it is for the companies for whom we regularly run these training sessions.

If you are interested in finding out more about our training, or our Diamond Mark
independent certification services, please contact our commercial manager, Jan Antonovics.

13 December 2017