What/who is a RA consultant

[Nearlybaldandgrey]

I'm not trying to provoke a conflict or rift between Inspecting officers and consultants, I was merely curious hence my question.

As an inspecting officer, my main purpose is to carry out inspections and audits to guage compliance to current legislation, then provide advice and guidance on how to achieve it.
I personally pride myself on heving a working knowledge of Health and Safety that applies to the premises. I am not, however there to look at health and safety as a specific area.
I also appreciate that as a relatively new officer, I am on a very steep learning curve, and have barely begun to scratch the surface of the subject.

I deal with large profit making organisations, realise they have budgets (which they are sometimes reluctant to spend) and have many requirements to meet from various legislation.

[Bluefire1]

I personally pride myself on heving a working knowledge of Health and Safety that applies to the premises. I am not, however there to look at health and safety as a specific area.

There should be little argument beween IO's and Consultants.. no more than exists at the moment between design and inspection.. there will always be differences of opinion.

But to take you up on the quoted point, I came from a Met Brigade and as such  we dealt with petroleum and explosives later to become DSEAR and MSER, so the working knowledge of general H&S had to be put in place more than in the general FPA/FP(W)R senarios, many other FSO's I met had never dealt with those areas (done by Trading Standards) and through no fault of their own (a legal glitch) had less understanding of certain matters. When I retired, I had the engineering degree, some 15 years in FS both as an IO and at HQ in policy development, but I took NEBOSH in order that I could do the job to my best. The new understanding of H&S regarding process work opened my eyes to RA and how things can change (or will change) when you use the principles of RR(FS).

Also as Chris points out there are matters such as vicarious liability to look at... (Vicarious liability is a legal concept that means that a party may be held responsible for injury or damage, when in reality they were not actively involved in the incident), the whole ball game statrts to become a nightmare. No disrespect to anyone but it now goes beyond the Certificate and the guides and I would suggest that a lot of FSO's do not have the training (again not down to them, but their brigade) to carry out or validate full FRA's.

[Adam Jackson]

One thing that often gets overlooked in the 'depth of knowledge' debate is the ability to do a risk assessment rather than an audit. I've seen a few fire risk assessments that were basically audits against the relevant British Standards rather than an assessment of the risk level in the workplace concerned. First and foremost risk assessments need to be relevant to the specific workplace in question.

That is something which is very hard to certify by exam, membership of something like the IFE, etc.

[fred]

It might be worth reminding ourselves of RRO 18(5) which states :

"A person is to be regarded as competent for the purposes of this article where he has sufficient training and experience or knowledge and other qualities to enable him to properly assist in undertaking the preventive and protective measures"

"other qualities" ?  - well it certainly isn't prescriptive !!

And may be worthwhile remembering A.A.Milne's gem "Good judgement comes from experience - and experience comes from poor judgement"