The Legislative Lexicon

Within the UK, legislation forms the foundations of many of the management systems and practices found on UK construction sites. Historically, this legislation was focused on danger, security 

Unpacking Construction Site Safety, First Edition. Dr Fred Sherratt. 

Within the 1878 Act, safety, or rather safe, makes its first appearance with relation to mill gearing  

Cl 5 (3) every part of the mill gearing shall either be securely fenced or be in such position or of such construction as to be equally safe to every person employed in the factory as it would be if it were securely fenced. 

safe is positioned as a relative state, clearly given context in the form of secure fencing, providing a tangible example of what safe should be in practice. This inclusion of a relative example is common in this Act, which also incorporates unsafety in the form of danger  

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The polarised safe/unsafe of the legislative lexicon has unsurprisingly become embedded in organisational safety management practices and safety management systems. Binary evaluations of safety are therefore also found at the heart of various safety management activities, such as risk assessments and site inspections, and so have considerable influence on the construction of safety in practice. 

It is not hard to find this legislative lexicon of safety - the legalese -on construction sites, often within safety documentation and induction materials. The safe systems of work and working environment found in Clauses 2(a) and 2(d) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, respectively can be easily found throughout our safety documentation. They are often either associated with general management practices or focused on specific work tasks such as falls/ fall prevention or excavations, where guidance often makes explicit reference to a safe system of work. ... 

And indeed this lexicon does have consequences in its application to practice. The development of legislation over time saw the shift from ideas of danger to those of safe, and so rather than seeking to prevent danger or remove risk, the lexicon has redirected the construction of safety to that of a descriptive state. Yet this also inevitably creates a reality in which safe should be readily and indeed easily identified as such something is either safe or it is not - but this does not allow for any middle ground. The contemporary lexicon of the law has had significant influence on our version of safety, and it has been polarised into just two terms ... 

It is therefore unsurprising that away from the formal manifestations of legal requirements in safety management systems and documents, safety becomes much more fluid and flexible. When those who work on sites everyday try to adopt the polarised lexicon of safety with their own understandings of construction site life, it doesn t quite work. Evidence of this can be readily found in site-produced safety documentation (as opposed to formal corporate documents distributed by contractor head offices), such as induction slides, where the site team often try to reposition safe/ unsafe within a wider context examples of practice are given as they were in the earliest legislation, the acknowledgement of variation... 

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