A word from one of our Directors…

I recently attended a health and safety training day at the BBC and it set me to thinking. Steeldeck works in three main industries: Entertainment, Events and Exhibitions, and at least one of these has several sub-divisions. One thing that unites them, apart from the fact that they all need staging in one form or another, is the way the changes to health and safety over the last twenty years have changed the way the industries work.

Room for improvement

Each industry has developed its own somewhat unique health and safety management systems. Sure, all the industries look for risk assessments and method statements but how knowledgeable are we as practitioners and what support systems do we have?

Why a Steeldeck blog?

I’m keen to use this blog to try and help us all understand more about our responsibilities, how to determine what is good practice (not as easy as it might sound), and ultimately provide a forum for advice and help.

To that end I’ve invited a handful of health and safety experts from different backgrounds to contribute their own thoughts by highlighting where things have gone wrong (thus, I hope, helping us to get it right).

I’m hoping to expand this with points of view from practitioners, structural engineers and perhaps even find a lawyer and/or insurance broker to contribute their opinions.

Ultimately, we want to keep the blog open to development and expand it as a resource. This won’t happen over night but please bear with us and let’s see what we can achieve together.

Richard, Steeldeck Director

We’ll also be spending some time on industry standards as the number of different rules and regulations (and the ambiguity within them!) regarding temporary structures mean that it’s not always clear how to achieve the

proper standard of construction and do so within budget.   To help you we’ll be using the blog to build on our Useful Info section.

Sounds a little dry? We’ll be doing our damndest to give all that an interesting twist by making it relevant to your work, rather than just quoting current legislation at you. The aim is to make this blog the one-stop resource for anyone running events and needing staging, seating or other structures.

We’ll only start off with a post or two a month, so to help you remember us we recommend you bookmark this blog or add our RSS feed, and together we’ll make this the hub of all things Staging and Seating. Towards that aim, we’ll love getting your feedback- both on your experiences of event industry construction, and this blog — and what you want to see discussed (and showcased) in the future.