The Worktop Fabricators Federation (WFF) met with members of the Health and Safety Executive at Porcelanosa in Glasgow to review draft guidelines to improve manufacturing practice, highlighting the need for proper risk management and the dangers of dry-cutting.

This was the first opportunity for members, potential members and sponsors of the WFF from England and Scotland to comment and reflect on the proposed safety guidelines designed to help keep workers safe.

Senior HSE occupational hygiene expert Sue Hamblin and stone industry lead Natalie Tinsley shared the thinking behind the new guidelines, and the HSE’s determination to address the industry’s fears that the actions of a few unprincipled manufacturers might compromise the whole market for engineered stone worktops.

“There is no appetite in Westminster for Australian-style product-bans,” said WFF consultant Chris Pateman. “If the Australian industry had been subject to the kind of regulatory environment we enjoy in the UK, the ban would probably never have come about in the first place.

“All of the UK cases of occupationally-acquired silicosis so far have been among young men who have contracted the disease over a very short time frame, because they have been routinely exposed to many times the Workplace Exposure Limit. The WFF and the HSE are working closely on this, because we have a mutual interest in ensuring good practice is recognised.”

WFF members are all invited to review and share comments on the draft guidelines, before HSE takes a view on how and when to publish a final version – something that will be suitable not only for professional fabricators, but for building site managers, for point-of-sale display next to stone worktop blanks in joinery wholesalers, and for kitchen showroom managers, to remind them that with the decision to sub-contract fabrication of a stone worktop comes a legal responsibility as the lead contractor to ensure that fabrication is undertaken against a properly risk-assessed procedure.

For more information, contact: office@worktopfabricators.org