IT is always the case that facts and figures can be very misleading depending how they are interpreted.
Whilst it is not our intention to dispute the prosecution statistics released by the Labour Department on February 29, we want to clarify the situation, because many newspaper articles carried headlines saying the accident rate and fatal rate in the construction industry were on the rise.
These headlines are misleading.
It is incorrect to look at the recent trend of accidents in the construction industry and conclude that the rates are rising. In fact, the reverse is true.
Accidents in the construction industry have been on the way down since 1988 when they hit a high of 27,125.
They have been dropping since then and have come down by 43.7 per cent, when compared with 1995, when there were 15,268 accidents.
This reflects the efforts of contractors to promote construction site safety in recent years.
