Site & safety

A competent person, and competence is not a certificate. No market names a qualification you must hold to write one, which surprises people who assume there is a course. What it means in practice is somebody with enough knowledge of the work and the hazards to recognise what could go wrong, enough experience to judge whether a control will hold, and enough honesty to know where their own knowledge runs out and to get somebody else. The HSE says so in those terms, and Australia gets to the same place from a different direction by requiring the SWMS be developed in consultation with the workers who will do the job, on the grounds that they know things an office does not.

Sources: Risk assessment, HSEHigh risk construction work requiring a SWMS

As a starting point yes, as the finished article almost never. A generic assessment is a reasonable way to avoid retyping the same six hazards on every job, and nobody expects a fresh blank page each morning. What gets it rejected is when the generic version is the only version, because the part anybody checking actually reads is the part that could only have been written about your site: the access, the other trades, the thing that is different this week. That is also the part that protects somebody, since the hazards a template lists are the ones everybody already knew about.

Source: Risk assessment templates and examples, HSE

Not as it stands, and the gap is structural rather than a matter of wording. A SWMS has required contents that a British method statement has no field for: which of the high risk categories applies, how each control will be monitored, and crucially who by, named. Nothing in the British format asks that, so a converted document is missing a column rather than a paragraph. It also has to be developed in consultation with the workers doing the job, which is a process requirement you cannot retrofit by editing a file.

Source: High risk construction work requiring a SWMS

There is no annual rule, and almost everybody believes there is. The test is whether it is still valid, so what triggers a review is a change rather than a date: new plant, a new substance, a different sequence, a near miss, an injury, or new people on the job who were not part of the original thinking. A yearly look is a sensible habit and it is a habit rather than a duty. The trap is the opposite one: a document reviewed on schedule every January, on a job that changed in March, is out of date and has a recent date on it, which is worse than obviously stale.

Source: Managing risks, HSE

Related but not the same, and the words are not interchangeable. In Britain the principal contractor is a CDM duty holder appointed on a project with more than one contractor. In Australia a PCBU is much broader: a person conducting a business or undertaking, which covers a one-man band as much as a main contractor. Australia has principal contractors too, one per construction project at a time, and Safe Work Australia is explicit that a principal contractor is a PCBU. So every principal contractor is a PCBU and most PCBUs are not principal contractors.

Source: Working on a construction site, Safe Work Australia

Same meeting, different word, and the word depends on where you are standing. Britain and Australia say toolbox talk, America says tailgate meeting or safety meeting, and prestart or take five covers the shorter daily version everywhere. None of them is a legal term with a defined format, which is the useful part: what gets audited is not the talk, it is the attendance register. A talk everybody remembers and nobody signed is worth less on paper than a dull one with fifteen signatures on it.

It depends on the market and on what the record is, and the periods are not close to each other, so guessing is how people end up destroying something they needed. What makes it awkward is that an accident record is also health information about a named person, so data protection pulls in the opposite direction from the retention duty: keep it long enough to satisfy one, not so long that you fail the other. The record retention tool on this site works the date out per market and per record type rather than giving one blanket number.

More often than they expect, and Britain nearly changed that and then did not. Since 2015 the general duty on the self-employed under the Health and Safety at Work Act applies only where the work can affect other people, or where the trade is on a prescribed list, and construction is on that list, so for anybody on a site nothing actually changed. In Australia a sole trader is a PCBU in their own right, so the duties land directly rather than by extension. What does genuinely scale down is the paperwork: a one-person business is not writing a construction phase plan. What it will still be asked for is a risk assessment or a SWMS, by whoever is letting it onto the site.

Sources: Risk assessment, HSEWorking on a construction site, Safe Work Australia

No, and no free tool can make that promise, including this one. A signature records that a named person accepts the document is suitable for the job in front of them, which is a judgement only somebody who has seen the job can make. Every tool here produces the document and none of them says the word compliant, because the thing that makes a statement adequate is whether the controls in it fit your actual site. What we can do is make sure nothing required is missing, which is a different and much more honest claim.

A hazard assessment, and it is provincial rather than national, so the exact duty depends on which province you are in rather than on Ottawa. On top of the written assessment for the job, a lot of Canadian sites run a field level hazard assessment, a short card filled in by the crew at the workface before each shift or when the work changes. That is the closest thing to the Australian take five, and it is the one visitors from other markets have usually never met.

Source: Hazard and risk, CCOHS