Since 1997, the number of construction accidents per year has declined from 18,559 at the time of the handover to 3,400 last year, although last year saw a minor but significant increase in the number of accidents on small-scale building sites.

The basic occupational health and safety regulations are laid out by the labour department and follow the British system, and the Occupational Safety and Health Council (OSHC) has done much to support them through consultation and the dissemination of information, education and campaigns to promote greater awareness.

Individuals or companies must apply these regulations through personal vigilance or in-house health and safety personnel. Large firms such as Gammon Construction employ a whole department dedicated to health and safety.

'We have close to 50 registered health and safety officers,' said Edmond Chan Shun-chuen, technical services manager for Gammon Construction. 'Most graduated with a bachelor's degree and then did a safety training course followed by one year's practical experience before getting certified by the labour department.'

Hong Kong law stipulates that any building site with 100 workers or more must employ a health and safety officer to monitor its safety. When a site has several hundred workers, three or four safety officers may be required to ensure that regulations are followed. While large companies are switched on to the need for effective health and safety regulations, smaller firms are slipping through the net.

'The main problem now is renovation and maintenance carried out by small contractors, micro-contractors or self-employed workers,' said Tang Wah-shing, executive director of the OSHC.

'A lot of maintenance is now done by these kinds of people and it's a major problem because they are difficult to regulate. Sometimes the job is so small they don't even report the work to the labour department,' he said.

Because repair and maintenance jobs are small-scale, there is often no health and safety officer to keep the guidelines in place.

In an effort to regulate the situation, the labour department has made it mandatory for all construction workers to pass basic health and safety training. Having a 'green card' which shows proof that the training has been completed grants the worker permission to take up gainful construction employment.

Companies such as Gammon supplement this training with their own in-house training, which requires workers to complete a course in trench digging, climbing, high working or working in confined spaces before they can work on a Gammon site.

'Close to 45,000 workers have gone through this training,' Mr Chan said. 'This represents about a quarter of the total workforce in the industry.'

This sort of grounding is slowly trickling down into the industry, but further efforts are needed to reach small-scale contractors and self-employed workers. In general the OSHC has looked to the construction industry in Japan for best practices.

'The Japanese construction industry has always had a very good health and safety record, so we took some general managers from construction firms in Hong Kong and went to Japan to see how they did it. More than 40 per cent of accidents are due to poor housekeeping such as tripping over left objects or slipping on wet floors. We saw the Japanese had a very good system, so we learnt how they did it,' Mr Tang said.

Safety officers, advisers, site

foremen and project managers play important roles in keeping a construction site safe, but both the OSHC and companies such as Gammon stress that ultimately safety is up to the individual workers.

'They have to make it safe for themselves,' Mr Chan said. 'We try to educate the frontline workers to voice the stuff that they find wrong. Safety is everybody's responsibility.'

Key Players

Project manager

Site manager

Health and safety manager

Foreman

Registered safety officer

Assistant safety officer

Industry Jargon

Morning assembly daily work is discussed, hazards are pointed out and stretching exercises are performed

Tool box talk training on the use of certain tools is given to workers to update or refresh their knowledge

Site safety induction training new staff are given an introduction to the site and the existing safety issues

Safety inspection part of the responsibility carried out by health and safety officers every day to identify danger areas at the site

Safety committee meeting where current or potential safety issues are discussed and addressed

Method statement a description of proposed construction methods for achieving project goals. These must be approved by a registered safety officer