CITB- rolls out new safety test

Your Expert Witness CITBConstruction companies in Kirklees are being urged to train their workers to improve safety on the building site.

CITB-ConstructionSkills, the industry training board and sector skills council for construction is rolling out a new Health, Safety and Environment Test, which comes into place from April 1.

This comes at a time when the Health and Safety Executive has been clamping down on construction site safety.

Between February 20 and March 16, the HSE inspectors have been visiting Yorkshire construction sites as part of an inspection initiative aimed at reducing death and injury in the construction sector.

Anyone taking the Health, Safety and Environment Test after April 1 will need to familiarise themselves with the updated question bank and the new features of the test in order to give themselves the best chance of completing it.

The test includes a number of new elements whilst retaining core fundamentals, including: a fully refreshed and updated question bank including the new universal hazard symbols; an increase in the number of questions on respiratory risks and the hazards they can pose; knowledge questions on the environment; behavioural case studies which assess how a candidate responds to highlight safe working practices on site.

New revision information is available, including the video ‘Setting Out’, a unique training video which highlights the required behaviours of both the site management and the workers.

Kevin Fear, head of health and safety strategy at CITB-ConstructionSkills, said: “Whilst construction workers need good awareness of the health, safety and environmental issues that affect construction sites, further improvements to the industry’s accident record will only be made once we have workers responding appropriately to the conditions that they will find on site.”

Visit www.cskills.org