The ECS Health, Safety and Environmental Awareness (HSE) Assessment is being updated to include further questions on fire safety in buildings.
As part of the work of the Competence Steering Group review into individual competence post-Grenfell, one of the outputs from Dame Judith Hackitt’s recommendations was a minimum awareness level of fire safety in buildings. A group was set up to develop materials and consider what the minimum standard should be to improve awareness of fire safety between trades working in a building, and how areas such as fire-stopping and compartmentation can be better addressed as part of a holistic approach to fire safety.
As with the introduction of a minimum awareness level for health and safety (and latterly environmental awareness) across all CSCS and Alliance members, the intention of Working Group 2: Installers was to set a minimum level of awareness expected of all relevant roles within an in-scope buildings and then the built environment more generally.
The impact of improved health and safety awareness in the construction industry since 2001, and mandating this as part of all CSCS Alliance members as part of licence requirements, has seen a more than 90% fall in deaths and accidents on construction sites and related projects.
As ECS HSE awareness already covered most of the same material and many of the training and qualification routes in the electrotechnical industry already cover such content, it was decided to update the question bank to cover the small number of additional topics and questions to align with this new standard. This saves time and money for ECS cardholders and avoids the need to undertake a separate assessment. Free to access video training has been developed by CITB to support this awareness.
The new question bank becomes active for assessments through ECS from 6 May 2024, but the revision materials and question book have been updated already to include these additional questions.
This work aligns ECS with the new competence regime and ECS is the first CSCS Alliance scheme to take this proactive step to provide a pragmatic solution to this challenge to raising the bar on competence.
Free online training from the CITB is available to support this topic and fill any knowledge gaps to identify and mitigate potential fire hazards.
Find out more about the ECS HSE Assessment and download the free ECS revision guide here.