Designers have been terrified into assuming responsibility for site safety 鈥� so much so that they now have to spend more time saving themselves than the workers

There were 235 fatal injuries to workers in 2004. About a third of fatalities were in the construction industry, which represents a little over 5% of total employment. Forty-seven percent of fatal injuries were because of falls from height. Designing for safety when working at height requires a budget for top quality access equipment and basic training, but even with those in place there will always be fools who fail to take responsibility for their own backs. Fools in the double sense of those who take chances with their own health and safety, and those who never challenge hazardous instructions from dodgy employers. Three-quarters of those killed in construction are self-employed or work for a firm employing fewer than 15 people, and half of all deaths happen on sites with fewer than 15 workers.

But most injury and ill-health in construction, as in the rest of the economy, is more mundane. It is usually a consequence not of recklessness or timidity, but rather it is an occupational hazard. An estimated 2.2 million people in Britain suffered last year from an illness that they believed was caused or made worse by a current or previous job. Of those, one in five suffers from back pain. So the Health and Safety Executive will be imploring manual sectors to join the Backs! 2005 campaign.

The HSE can sound sensible about routine laborious work that happens on site. The danger is that such campaigns become a preoccupation for designers desperate to be seen to be responsible for the health and safety of workers they have no real control over 鈥� workers who are only on site carrying out manual labour because buildings are not being efficiently manufactured under better, mechanised working conditions.

Brian Thorpe鈥檚 Health and Safety in Construction Design, published by RIBA Enterprises and CITB-ConstructionSkills, encourages the assumption of responsibility by the designer. Thorpe appreciates that there are construction workers who 鈥渕ay be resistant to regulations and often willing to take personal risk鈥�. He acknowledges that 鈥渄esigners may only be actively present for a very small percentage of any given project.鈥� Yet he maintains that designers are primarily responsible for risk in construction.

Thorpe is too uncritical of the roles of clients and contractors, and tends to disregard the fact that construction workers are grown-ups, at liberty to refuse potentially injurious work. No designer has the power to force any of these individuals to do anything they don鈥檛 want to. And like the tradesman, a professional may resign from a project that is badly run to the point where someone might get hurt. But Thorpe鈥檚 willingness to point the finger at the designer as the pivotal figure in health and safety is in tune with the times.

The HSE is certainly looking to prosecute a designer or two for causing a fatality as an example to all. The wider response to this will be that designers become more risk conscious, running scared that they have not been seen to have made enough effort to reduce the construction process to the occasional lifting of small lightweight objects, all at ground level. It will not help that many professionals may be implicated in making project decisions, so that identifying 鈥渢he designer鈥� may be difficult.

No designer has the power to force anyone to do anything they don鈥檛 want to

Small wonder, then, that designers are attracted to any number of the 拢400-a-day seminars aimed at raising safety awareness about all sorts of perceived threats. Courses that are marketed by exaggerating 鈥渢he increasingly litigious nature鈥� of the industry, and warning the bewildered professional that non-attendance is to 鈥済amble with your accountability鈥�.

And now, the CITB has turned Thorpe鈥檚 book into a three-day training course, with the implication that if a designer has not sat the course they will be considered incapable of producing proper health and safety risk assessments.

Design professionals will have to watch their own backs through the production of time-consuming risk assessments. Meanwhile levels of back pain in the backward construction industry will persist, as, sadly, will the incidence of fatal falls from height 鈥� until most buildings are manufactured.

Ian Abley is a practising architect, runs www.audacity.org, and is the author of Why is construction so backward?