There has been much correspondence about the Government proposal to make authorised persons and registered structural engineers criminally liable for safety on building sites. I question the reasoning behind it. First I assume the objective is to reduce the number of accidents on building sites. The flaw in the Government proposal lies in the assumption that the authorised person or engineer is directly concerned with day-to-day safety. He is not. The proposal would have produced a scapegoat but not a solution. The contractor is in a position to control safety, but the concept of placing responsibility at as high level as possible, is inappropriate. The fact is the person on the spot and most likely to observe in advance a dangerous situation, is the worker, not the boss. The thinking is upside down. In the United States they have a much more positive approach and encourage employees to report potentially dangerous situations. To support this they have passed legislation. Whatever the effectiveness of such a device, its existence shows a different direction of thinking, to encourage the worker, who is best placed to observe problem areas, to report concerns. Britain has passed similar legislation. Of even longer standing is Britain's Department of Health and Social Security system of encouraging the reporting of potentially dangerous incidents in hospitals, with guaranteed protection of the reporter, which has resulted in a huge amount of information being correlated showing trends that would not have otherwise been observed in isolation. Once again, the most appropriate person to observe the problem is the person who is there when it happens. It works. No one can argue that workers would not co-operate, because they do. Lately in the US some large companies have started incentive schemes where employees are actually rewarded for reporting loopholes in safety. It seems that, rather than leaning so heavily on bosses and senior supervisors with the big stick, it would be preferable to introduce, either additionally or alternatively, a reporting system at worker level, with suitable protection and incentives, and correlated centrally, so that not only individual lapses in safety could be caught and corrected, as early as possible, but trends among a number of building sites could be identified and even standard practice could be scrutinised and improved. SAMUEL P W Wong Legislative Councillor Engineering Constituency