On this episode of The Engaging Marketeer I’m speaking with Shabbir Halai, who is a health and safety expert based in Cuddington in the UK. Shabbir goes around businesses like mine, like yours, construction sites and various companies around the UK, showing them what they need to do to keep their employees safe, their workers safe, their customers safe and generally keep everybody from having nasty accidents. But above all, he also helps people stay out of prison, stay out of fines, and stay off the target list of the Health and Safety Executive. But don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a dull podcast about health and safety. Shabbir is an extremely interesting and engaging person, and he’s got some stories to share about accidents on the Harry Potter film set and meeting Barbara Windsor on the set of EastEnders.
Darren Jamieson [01:46]
“Get out of my pub!” Let’s have a word with Shabbir. I was reading a little bit about your history and the stuff you’ve done before your health and safety journey. One of the obvious things that caught my eye was the fact that you have been an extra in several films and TV shows, including Harry Potter. How did you get into that, and what was it like doing that sort of stuff?
Shabbir Halai [02:06]
Yeah, it’s really weird actually. I supplied a lot of stuff to a client. He moved and went into a modelling agency, and then I got a phone call from Marky saying, “Oh Shabbir, we need you for an upcoming thing. I’ve got a job – they want an Asian-looking man but with a British voice.” I’m like, “Okay, what does it mean?” And it was extra work. I’m like, “Mark, I’m not an extra. No thank you.”
Shabbir Halai [02:36]
He phoned the week after. “The client’s still looking.” No. Phoned again. Then the third time he said, “Look, the client really wants to see you. They want to interview you in Switzerland. Would you just go and talk to them?”
Darren Jamieson [02:42]
Switzerland?
Shabbir Halai [02:44]
So yeah. They said, “We’ll send you to Switzerland, they’ll talk to you.” And that’s it, sign me up. So I went over to Switzerland, saw Credit Suisse, did an interview, came back, and they liked me. So I did a film for them, a little film. And I said to Mark, “That was great but I hated learning all these lines. Is there anything easier?” He said, “Oh, extra work should be you just pop on to a set, smile, pretend to talk to someone and you get paid at the end of the day.”
Shabbir Halai [03:14]
I said, “That’s me. Let me do that.” And I just did lots of extra work. It’s so easy. I love it.
Darren Jamieson [03:21]
What, you originally wanted to be an actor?
Shabbir Halai [03:24]
Absolutely not. People think I want to be an actor because I love presenting. I love health and safety training. I’m out there, quite vocal. But no, actually being an actor, learning lines, is the most fearful thing to me.
Darren Jamieson [03:39]
Really?
Shabbir Halai [03:41]
Really scary. That particular job took me two weeks to record my lines and listen to them every day to memorise. I’ve got an awful memory. I did it and said, “Mark, never again.” So he signed me up for what I now know is extra work – and what fun that is.
Darren Jamieson [04:03]
So is it really like what the Ricky Gervais TV show Extras shows?
Shabbir Halai [04:06]
I recognised so many aspects in that. That was brilliant. I now know that a lot of extras like to nudge forward, nudge forward to get closer to the director, get closer to the actor or actress. A lot of extras want to be actors. I do admit that.
Shabbir Halai [04:26]
But because I didn’t want to learn any lines, it was horrifying sometimes when you’re as an extra on set and the director comes up to you. “Oh, can you just say this line? And… action.” I’m like, “Oh no.”
Shabbir Halai [04:45]
I remember the first time that happened. The director said, “Oh you need to say this line. We’re in a hospital scene, surgery, we need to get the baby out now.”
Shabbir Halai [04:56]
The director said, “Action.” “We need to get the baby out now.” “Cut. Can you say it with more verb but not as slow?”
Shabbir Halai [05:07]
“I don’t know what that means.” “We need to get the baby out now.” “Cut. Say it quicker but with more passion.”
Shabbir Halai [05:12]
“We need to get the baby out now.” Luckily the third time, that was it. I said to Mark, “No more. I don’t want to say any extra lines.”
Darren Jamieson [05:18]
Did you get paid extra for saying lines?
Shabbir Halai [05:21]
Yes, you do actually. That’s why a lot of extras want to hold a prop – you know, a sword gets you more money. Saying a line gets you more money. But I’m like, “No, just leave me alone. Let me just be in the background, smile, pretend to talk to someone. That’ll do me.”
Darren Jamieson [05:43]
So does that mean quite a few times then you’ve been sat at home or in the cinema watching something and been able to point yourself out?
Shabbir Halai [05:50]
Oh yeah. It’s quite funny. I was re-watching The Jury I think it was. That was quite an easy one because you’re just sitting up in the jury. You’ve just got to look pensive. You know, looking down, looking pensive.
Shabbir Halai [06:04]
Some interesting ones. You get to meet some really nice actors, some not quite as nice as you would hope.
Shabbir Halai [06:12]
Obviously you’re not genuinely allowed to talk to them. I think one of the funniest ones or one of the nicest ones for me was on EastEnders. I was on the phone chatting away at lunchtime and Barbara Windsor came up to me.
Shabbir Halai [06:30]
She said, “Oh hello, how are you?” “I’m fine, thank you.” “Lovely. Thank you very much for coming on. Really appreciate all you extras. You do great work. You’re marvellous.” She said, “You’re marvellous. Thank you very much.” And she toddled off.
Shabbir Halai [06:41]
I’m like, “God, I just spoke to Barbara Windsor.”
Darren Jamieson [06:48]
Wow. So she was genuinely nice?
Shabbir Halai [06:50]
Absolutely. Definitely.
Darren Jamieson [06:55]
One of the things you’ve also put down on your BNI profile, I believe, is that you wanted to get into health and safety after seeing some of the things that went on on film sets.
Shabbir Halai [07:07]
Yeah. I was pretty shocked at the range of accidents and dangerous places I saw. I thought, okay, this is a great sort of industry to get involved in. But on a Harry Potter set – I won’t say which particular film – this massive chandelier just came and fell down.
Shabbir Halai [07:30]
It wasn’t part of the film at all, and it just missed one of the little people by literally a few inches. Everyone was in shock. I was probably about 10 or 15 feet away.
Shabbir Halai [07:44]
I heard the director swearing, “Get rid of that mess. Come on, we need to carry on filming.” Everyone’s rushing around to get the chandelier’s broken pieces away and there’s “Action.”
Shabbir Halai [07:55]
I’m like, “Okay, what about that poor person who’s nearly decimated?”
Darren Jamieson
So you thought, right, you don’t want to do health and safety for film and television because quite frankly it’s an absolute bloody nightmare. I presume as well if you’re doing health and safety for, say, a construction site, they are motivated to get it right. They want to get it right because the consequences are huge, whereas from what you’ve said about film and TV, they’re not that bothered about getting it right. They just want to scrape somebody out of the way and carry on regardless.
Shabbir Halai [10:25]
Yeah, I think maybe on film and TV there’s so much going on, maybe there’s a sort of pressure to film and costs. So I’m not saying they completely ignored health and safety, but they certainly didn’t do as much as I would have done or could have done.
Shabbir Halai [10:38]
Construction – it’s interesting what you said, Darren, that they’re more motivated. Sadly, most of the workplace fatalities happen in the construction industry – work from heights, falls, etc. So I don’t know if they’re more motivated.
Shabbir Halai [10:58]
Certainly the inspectors inspect construction sites more than most other types of premises. The other fixed premises you can think of – factories, workshops, warehouses, care homes, etc. – construction is a big focus because that’s where most of the risks lie.
Darren Jamieson [11:23]
And of course the consequences of breaking the rules on construction – prison sentences if it goes wrong.
Shabbir Halai [11:29]
Absolutely. And I mean there aren’t that many prosecutions if I’m honest. Something like 200-odd, the last statistics I’ve seen. But they’re criminal prosecutions.
Shabbir Halai [11:46]
And what a lot of people don’t realise is that if the inspector decides to take your business to court – or the director – it’s a criminal prosecution. All those people that are found guilty in the courts – and quite honestly the inspector wins on 94% of the cases – they’re not going to prosecute unless they’re going to win.
Shabbir Halai [12:05]
That person, the supervisor, the director – it’s a criminal liability. So those that are found guilty – some are punished with huge fines, some are punished with jail sentences.
Shabbir Halai [12:16]
Typically, although the maximum in law is 18 years, it’s unusual as you can imagine. So it’s typically six, nine, 12 months. But of course, it was only last week that the director got jailed for 10 and a half years because four people died during that particular incident.
Shabbir Halai [12:40]
So there is the ability to be sent to jail for a long period. And once you’re found guilty – criminal record – you’ll find it hard to get a mortgage or a loan, you’re often struck off as a director for five years. So lots of consequences beyond the actual court fine really.
Shabbir Halai [13:01]
And our job in health and safety – all the health and safety professionals – our job is to try and prevent that accident or incident from happening so the director can’t be prosecuted, the company can’t go to the courts.
Darren Jamieson [13:13]
What possessed you to want to do that in the first place? Because I’ve got a mate who works in health and safety – I’ll name him – he works for JD Sports and he reviews all of the stores before they open and then does spot inspections of them as well to make sure that when the health and safety inspector turns up they’re doing everything they should do.
Darren Jamieson [13:32]
So it’s better he finds problems than they find problems. But he refers to himself as the fun sponge. “Oh no, it’s the health and safety people. They’ve turned up. They’ve ruined all the fun. We’ve got to put all this clothing on, we’ve got to put these hats on. Ridiculous.” What makes you want to be a fun sponge?
Shabbir Halai [13:51]
That’s interesting because – I’ll be very honest here, hands up – when I left school all those years ago, I don’t know if it’s the same now but in those days you were sent to the careers lady.
Shabbir Halai [14:03]
So I went to her and she said, “What do you like to do?” I said, “I love technical drawing. I’m always drawing cars, I’m always drawing car dashboards. I love drawing. I like technical drawing. I’m really good at metalwork and woodwork.”
Shabbir Halai [14:10]
“All right,” she said, “Come back next week.” So I went back next week. “Shabbir, you’re starting next week as an engineer in the chemical factory. You’ll be an engineer. And there’s a five-year apprenticeship.”
Shabbir Halai [14:21]
“Thank you. Is there a technical drawing department there?” She said, “I don’t know but when you get there ask them.” Sure enough, they did have a technical drawing department.
Shabbir Halai [14:33]
So I became an engineer. It was okay.
Darren Jamieson [14:38]
It was that simple? Your careers adviser got you the job?
Shabbir Halai [14:40]
Yes. In those days they got you a job. It was a four-year apprenticeship. And I did love it because you were making things – fabricating things, welding, cutting.
Shabbir Halai [14:55]
And I didn’t know it then. I really had no clue. But the engineers that taught me actually worked really, really safely. I had no concept of safety. I don’t remember safety. But they taught us in a safe way and we just learned our profession.
Shabbir Halai [15:08]
It was only later on I realised how good these guys were. Because the factory was bought up by Unilever and immediately closed down. Of course, we all got made redundant.
Shabbir Halai [15:19]
And I got a job in a sausage factory in Peckham – as you do – fixing the sausage machines.
Darren Jamieson [15:25]
[laughter]
Shabbir Halai [15:27]
Which – this is becoming Only Fools and Horses.
Darren Jamieson [15:30]
[laughter]
Shabbir Halai [15:32]
No, but sausage machines break down a lot, trust me, and slicing machines. All the time. “Oh no, not another problem with the sausage machine.”
Shabbir Halai [15:42]
But again, I loved fixing things. So you had to do a three-shift rota. I loved fixing.
Shabbir Halai [15:49]
About four, five, probably six years. And at some point – unfortunately every year an engineer would cut a finger off or slice a finger off or squeeze a finger off depending on what machine it was on.
Shabbir Halai [16:02]
And I remember at some point the chief engineer, Mike Newman, came up to me and said, “Shabbir, you’re just about the only engineer left with 10 fingers. Would you do our health and safety?”
Shabbir Halai [16:10]
I thought about it. I said, “If you send me on a proper course, yeah, I would.” So he said, “We’ll find a course and let me know.”
Shabbir Halai [16:18]
So I didn’t Google it because there was no such thing as Google, but researched it and found a two-week safety officer course. Got on it, got my first certificate.
Shabbir Halai [16:30]
And that was literally – that first certificate was 1989. I got my health and safety certificate that long ago. But I loved it.
Shabbir Halai [16:38]
It was just so easy. I came back from the course and thought, gosh, health and safety is so easy.
Shabbir Halai [16:43]
And I made so many small changes in this sausage factory, you wouldn’t believe it. Small changes. But no one else cut their finger off after that.
Shabbir Halai [16:56]
And the average – I think there were about 42 accidents per month on average – went down to two just with some minor changes that you wouldn’t believe now if I told you. So simple.
Shabbir Halai [17:11]
And the cost was almost insignificant. And I thought, this is easy. Stayed there a few more years doing health and safety.
Shabbir Halai [17:19]
And I think in the end they probably didn’t want to go as far as I would like them to go, so I was poached by Hammersmith and Fulham Council and became a safety officer there with lots of other people. And that was a great experience as well. I loved that.
Darren Jamieson [17:30]
Qualification? “Oh, we need someone to do health and safety in here. Shabbir, you’ve got all your fingers.” And clearly – just to let you know – clearly the man for the job.
Shabbir Halai [17:44]
[laughter]
Darren Jamieson [17:46]
I love that. So the qualification you did – I mean we’re going back a bit now aren’t we – but there are different types of health and safety qualifications. So there’s one specifically to do with food. Was yours a food health and safety qualification or was it a different one because you weren’t physically doing the food?
Shabbir Halai [18:03]
It wasn’t food safety. It was a health and safety qualification. The main ones now are NEBOSH General Certificate – still a two-week course. You can then move on to a NEBOSH Diploma as I did.
Shabbir Halai [18:15]
I’m a member of IOSH. IOSH is the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health – the largest organisation that covers health and safety in the world. So I’m a Chartered Member of IOSH.
Shabbir Halai [18:27]
They’ve got their own two or three-week courses. So there’s a range of courses.
Shabbir Halai [18:32]
Qualifications, I now know, are one thing. The certificate is important. I believe the actual practical health and safety is as important as well.
Shabbir Halai [18:45]
So getting a certificate is one thing. And what I noticed in COVID – a lot of people went online, a lot of people got health and safety qualifications.
Shabbir Halai [18:56]
The certificate you can get with good learning, but of course the practical implementation – that’s where you need to shadow someone really on health and safety to sort of learn the trade properly, as in any industry.
Darren Jamieson [19:08]
There was a lot of retraining going on during COVID, wasn’t there? And obviously health and safety being a big thing because people needed to make sure that when everybody went back to work procedures were going to be followed to make sure COVID wasn’t further spread or it didn’t come back. So I presume it was a boom time for you?
Shabbir Halai [19:25]
It was a bit of a difficult period in the sense that all around me business colleagues were quiet or stopping work, losing money, laying off people, furloughing people. And I was getting busier and busier.
Shabbir Halai [19:36]
We had to write a lot of COVID risk assessments, do assessments, do training.
Shabbir Halai [19:42]
So I did – I actually asked a mentor of mine, “I’m finding it difficult that we’re making more money whilst all around us are making less money.”
Shabbir Halai [19:50]
And it was an interesting chat. He said, “Shabbir, look, you’re helping these people out. If you don’t write these assessments that construction company is not allowed on site to do the work. Yet you’ve written the assessment, you’ve trained them, they’re carrying on doing the work. So you’ve allowed other companies to carry on working in times of hardship. Those people will help you out.”
Shabbir Halai [20:03]
That helped me a lot. But yeah, we did a lot of COVID risk assessments and helped a lot of people out. And I’m pleased we did actually.
Darren Jamieson [20:10]
And what is it about it that you actually enjoy? What gets you out of bed in the morning to do it?
Shabbir Halai [20:22]
Gosh. You know how directors seem to hate health and safety? Whether they don’t understand it, think it’s complicated, or think it’s expensive – it’s quite fascinating how many people just hate it.
Shabbir Halai [20:36]
How many directors have said to my face, “Oh, I hate health and safety. We haven’t got time.” But I say to them, “You’re an expert in your business. I can’t do what you’re doing. You’ve got the range of people doing this work. I can’t do it.”
Shabbir Halai [20:56]
We love health and safety, my team and I, because we simplify it. That’s the one thing – the slogan there: Simple, Sensible Safety.
Shabbir Halai [21:02]
What that really means is if we keep safety really simple, then people will do it, and they’ll do it more often. That’s a big win for us.
Shabbir Halai [21:10]
If we keep it sensible, which means appropriate to you and your business, then it’s appropriate. And safety really is the absence of danger and hazards. And who wouldn’t want the absence of danger and hazards?
Shabbir Halai [21:23]
So what gets me out of bed for health and safety? I love the simplicity of what we do.
Shabbir Halai [21:28]
Minor changes, minor small bits of training. It’s always little and often with health and safety.
Shabbir Halai [21:34]
Sometimes we take on a new customer, and they want all this stuff done next week. I say, “No, no, no. Let’s do it over a programme. Little and often. You’re busy doing your work. We’ll make some small changes.”
Shabbir Halai [21:50]
And there are some simple things that can give directors a big tick straight away.
Shabbir Halai [21:57]
Because I know, and my team know, that after an accident or an incident, and the inspector comes on board, they’re going to want to see your health and safety policy.
Shabbir Halai [22:08]
It doesn’t matter what you think – if you’ve got more than five employees you have to have a written health and safety policy by law. That’s it.
Shabbir Halai [22:14]
So have a policy, but make sure you sign it. If the director doesn’t sign it, it’s invalid. Make sure the date on it isn’t old. If you don’t review it every year, it can be out of date.
Shabbir Halai [22:26]
So have a health and safety policy and procedures that are not too old but signed.
Shabbir Halai [22:32]
The other thing they want to see is your risk assessments, because the law is very clear. You’re doing some work in your business – your car garage, your care home, your hotel – you must have risks in those.
Shabbir Halai [22:43]
All you’ve got to do is assess them. And most people have risks, and then they put in controls to prevent dangers. Well, write those down. And then just check the controls are enough for your business.
Shabbir Halai [22:54]
So you have to have written risk assessments. But again, if they’re not signed, they’re not really worth much.
Shabbir Halai [23:00]
If they’re more than a year old, the inspector could think, “Hang on, perhaps you haven’t taken into account the new legislation that came in last year.” So annual reviews are really important.
Shabbir Halai [23:11]
Policies – a big tick for a director. Risk assessments – a big tick. And the third one really is the simple one – training.
Shabbir Halai [23:22]
You have to have training in your industry. You’ve got to train your workers in whatever you do.
Shabbir Halai [23:29]
Sometimes it’s very easy. I listened to one of your podcasts, and the lady talked about musculoskeletal disorders.
Shabbir Halai [23:40]
If you use a computer, it can lead to musculoskeletal disorders – MSDs. Well, the computer regulations are very simple. They give you a guidance sheet on how to avoid those, how to use the computer safely so you don’t get MSDs – neck ache, back pain, visual problems.
Shabbir Halai [24:00]
That’s a simple assessment. It’s self-assessment, 90 minutes.
Shabbir Halai [24:07]
There are other training sessions you can do for people that will help them just be aware of the dangers all around them.
Shabbir Halai [24:12]
What you can’t do is assume that a worker knows the dangers, even though they’ve been in the industry for 15 years, 20 years. You can’t assume that.
Shabbir Halai [24:23]
And I think you can probably agree that if you do some training for someone on marketing, does it last forever? You’ve got to refresh it at some point, haven’t you? Because people forget things, and things change.
Shabbir Halai [24:35]
One of the big ones for construction companies that’s written in the law is that they must have asbestos awareness training every single year.
Darren Jamieson [24:43]
Really? Every year?
Shabbir Halai [24:45]
Every year. That’s the only regulation I can think of that says you must do something every year.
Shabbir Halai [24:50]
Directors say, “Why the hell? It’s really inconvenient, it’s costly. Why does it have to be every year?”
Shabbir Halai [24:57]
Well, go back to the regulations. We finally banned asbestos here in 1999. Why? Because it was killing so many workers every year. It still kills 5,000 people a year in the UK – asbestos or past asbestos exposure.
Shabbir Halai [25:17]
So the annual refresher just makes sure that new people coming into the industry are reminded. And we remind them asbestos is dangerous. It’s not dangerous if it’s not damaged and you don’t disturb it. But if you damage and disturb it, it’s dangerous.
Shabbir Halai [25:30]
So annual refresher training on that. Other things maybe every three years – manual handling, work at height. Legionella every two years.
Shabbir Halai [25:38]
There are a range of things. What’s suitable. But I love the simple things – if you can just simplify it and have a programme in place, little and often, you’d be amazed what can happen between now and six months’ time – the difference in your company and the outlook if you get on board.
Darren Jamieson [26:02]
Speaking then about the asbestos stuff – I had asbestos in a house I bought recently and had to have it redeveloped. Some of it was channelled out and disposed of, and much of it was left as is because there was some under the floor, some tiled on top of it – there’s no point to move it.
Darren Jamieson [26:14]
I remember speaking to my mate John, who does the health and safety for JD, and he was talking to me at great length about asbestos and the different types of asbestos, and how it’s actually marvellous stuff. Wonderful stuff. Incredible invention.
Darren Jamieson [26:30]
It’s just got this one minor flaw, which is a bit of a problem. Which is a real shame, because we never knew, did we, when we started using it?
Shabbir Halai [26:36]
Well, I’m going to maybe differ on that one. The first report came out in 1904 from a doctor who was very clear. He worked around a quarter from an asbestos factory and thought, “Hang on, why are so many people getting this disease and dying?”
Shabbir Halai [26:54]
And he found some form of link. It didn’t really go very far. Then World War I meant that we had to put lots of asbestos in ships and tanks. We didn’t have to, but they decided to.
Shabbir Halai [27:06]
And therefore it was used a lot. World War II – used a lot. Then of course the boom in construction. It was actually known as the miracle material because, although some people had found out about it, some of the scientific evidence –
Shabbir Halai [27:26]
Paid for by the asbestos industry – maybe didn’t do it justice. Rather similar to the smoking industry. Some of the smoking scientific evidence wasn’t maybe as thorough as it could have been.
Shabbir Halai [27:40]
The unions bashed away in the ’70s and ’80s. It was a voluntary ban. They bashed away and finally, in 1999, the UK decided to ban all the use and importation of chrysotile, amosite – the blue, brown and white asbestos.
Shabbir Halai [27:58]
But because of the latency period – now we’re talking 1999 is 26 years ago – asbestos can take 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 years to rear its head.
Shabbir Halai [28:12]
That’s why the deaths carried on. About 5,000. We expect them to level off. But health and safety is about preventing accidents and incidents.
Shabbir Halai [28:19]
Asbestos training once a year, surveys – every premise that was built before 1999 should have a survey. It’s £450–600. It’s a one-off thing that tells you where the asbestos is.
Shabbir Halai [28:39]
So there are simple ways in all aspects of health and safety to prevent accidents, incidents and occupational ill health.
Darren Jamieson [28:45]
Yeah, I had to have that. I had an asbestos survey on the house, finding all the areas where it was.
Shabbir Halai [28:50]
Exactly. Giving you the knowledge, the information, the tools to do something. If you don’t have that, you don’t have the tools to do the correct thing.
Shabbir Halai [28:57]
So training – health and safety training – is just a bit of information. Some of our courses online are 25 minutes, some an hour, some two hours.
Shabbir Halai [29:05]
You can do a toolbox talk on a construction site in 15 minutes. It doesn’t have to be lengthy. But you remind people. If you do little and often, that’s where safety improves over a period of time.
Darren Jamieson [29:20]
So is that sufficient then for construction companies? If they have somebody do an online course, say with yourself or somebody else, that can take half an hour or an hour once a year – that’s okay?
Shabbir Halai [29:27]
It’s all risk-assessment-based. What are you doing? Construction is vast.
Shabbir Halai [29:34]
I know people in construction that just lay carpets. The law says that is construction work, so they’ve got to have asbestos awareness training.
Shabbir Halai [29:41]
I know people who build buildings – six storeys, 25 storeys – that’s a different set. So your risks on your construction project have to be managed.
Shabbir Halai [29:53]
You do the induction that suits that particular site, and then your induction might say, “Okay, on this site we need to do a toolbox talk every week. On this site we’ve got to do it every day before you start work. On this site we do it once a month.”
Shabbir Halai [30:04]
It’s all risk-based. Everything is risk-based.
But what the inspector – I found from all the problems we get told of – we had about six new clients last year from construction where the inspector’s come along and issued a prohibition notice and stopped work completely.
Shabbir Halai [30:25]
You can appreciate that’s quite expensive.
Darren Jamieson [30:27]
Very expensive.
Shabbir Halai [30:28]
Yeah. But we found that all the inspector wanted was good management of the site. And if the management had some inkling of health and safety, then they would have known: risk assessment, method statement, policy and training.
Shabbir Halai [30:45]
Those are the common things. If you did those things, you would have solved all these issues and not had the improvement notice or the prohibition notice.
Shabbir Halai [30:56]
And welfare is another one that tends to get a notice on as well.
Shabbir Halai [31:02]
In construction, the clients – we’ve got two sets of clients: half of them are construction-based, half are not – but the construction ones get a template on how to run a site safely. It’s really super easy.
Shabbir Halai [31:14]
I’m happy to send you that template. You’ve just got to tick off some things to make sure you’ve covered them. It’s basic.
Shabbir Halai [31:26]
You’ve got to have welfare. If you don’t have toilet facilities and welfare facilities, the inspector – if they come by – will close you down. It’s as simple as that.
Shabbir Halai [31:32]
If you don’t have a first aid kit – you should. If you don’t have fire extinguishers – you should.
Shabbir Halai [31:38]
If you don’t have an emergency plan – what do you do if there’s a fire? “Well, we go there.” No, no. Don’t go there. This is safe. Or “We go there.”
Shabbir Halai [31:44]
It’s quite simple and basic. Health and safety, I think, in most businesses, just repeats – you’re doing the same thing.
Shabbir Halai [31:51]
We’ve got car garages with all the same risks in all our car garages we look after.
Shabbir Halai [31:57]
We do a training course or template course that suits them. Care homes – slightly different. We’ve changed the risk assessment for care homes.
Shabbir Halai [32:09]
Hotels – we look after them very differently now because of the changes in fire regulations. A couple of years ago the fire regulations changed quite dramatically, due in part to Grenfell.
Shabbir Halai [32:22]
Now we’ve got the Building Safety Act making small changes. But going back to health and safety – what is the point of health and safety?
Shabbir Halai [32:29]
It’s actually to prevent people losing their lives, and it’s actually to prevent accidents hurting and harming workers. That’s it.
Shabbir Halai [32:42]
The spin-off of that is that the company can’t get prosecuted, and the director can’t go to jail or be fined.
Shabbir Halai [32:50]
If you can implement some sort of simple process that suits your business, you won’t add to the death toll.
Shabbir Halai [32:57]
I think about 138 people died at work last year in the UK.
Shabbir Halai [33:04]
When I started in health and safety 35 years ago, it was about 700 people who died every year in the UK. That’s gone down year after year after year.
Shabbir Halai [33:15]
Why? A few more regulations, but also all those regulations now say: train people, remind them, train them, give them information – which is not a bad thing to do in my view.
Shabbir Halai [33:29]
But some directors think it’s complicated, awkward, difficult, expensive. What’s expensive is having the accident.
Darren Jamieson [33:35]
Yeah.
Shabbir Halai [33:37]
And I think what I found – it’s a bit bizarre really – but directors have told me after an incident it’s not necessarily the money it’s cost them.
Shabbir Halai [33:48]
You’ve got to pay the HSE – I think it’s £172 an hour for their fee for intervention. That’s only a few thousand, maybe £2,000 eventually.
Shabbir Halai [33:54]
It’s the time. The time they’ve got to be taken away from their business and deal with the inspector. The questions, the requests. “We want this, we want that.”
Shabbir Halai [34:07]
So I often probably exaggerate that aspect for directors. You’re going to save a lot of time if you don’t have accidents and incidents by putting in this very simple health and safety procedure.
Darren Jamieson [34:25]
Do you believe through the work that you’ve done that you’ve saved lives?
Shabbir Halai [34:30]
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think every professional throughout the world will say that. It’s quite hard to prove.
Shabbir Halai [34:42]
That’s one of the things about health and safety – you can spend some money on health and safety, nothing happens, and we can’t prove that had they had an accident, you would have saved this amount of money.
Shabbir Halai [34:49]
I can only go back to where we get called in after the accident, and then people tell us how much it costs.
Shabbir Halai [35:01]
We had a warehouse – food warehouse – in Brick Lane a few years ago. The inspector came by and shut it down. The director told me it cost him £42,000 to close that place for four days.
Shabbir Halai [35:10]
I charged him £1,500 to solve all the health and safety issues – literally policies, procedures, risk assessment, training – done in two days.
Shabbir Halai [35:23]
But how do you tell someone that if you spent this £1,500 you could have prevented being closed for four days?
Shabbir Halai [35:34]
I could say – and I don’t say – “It’s the law.” It doesn’t really convince directors.
Shabbir Halai [35:40]
I could say, “You might get fined tens of thousands of pounds.” Doesn’t really work.
Shabbir Halai [35:46]
I could say, “You might go to jail.” Directors don’t believe it.
Shabbir Halai [35:53]
I just know – most professionals know – that if we can just implement a little bit of health and safety, you’re not going to have that significant accident or incident. That’s all.
Darren Jamieson [36:00]
Well you do have to obviously convey that message yourself in BNI meetings. You have to get other people to understand that to refer you. So what is it you do to get that to work for you?
Shabbir Halai [36:12]
I often mention different things – sometimes an accident like today’s one, or a few days ago where that poor lady’s been jailed for 10 and a half years. That’s unusual.
Shabbir Halai [36:27]
We sometimes mention the fines. We took on a hotel a few years ago where the most random of accidents happened – a hotel guest opened her window, the window wasn’t secured.
Shabbir Halai [36:39]
You’re meant to have a window that opens four inches only on hotel windows. She opened it. And again, the plant pot out there wasn’t secure. She nudged it off the edge, fell on someone’s head.
Shabbir Halai [36:52]
They sued. It cost this company £100,000 fine. So I mentioned simple things like window restrictors.
Shabbir Halai [37:05]
I took in a window restrictor recently and said, “Look, you’ve got windows on the first floor or above and people could fall out. Consider this window restrictor.”
Shabbir Halai [37:17]
It was 245p. It cost me 245p.
Shabbir Halai [37:23]
And I mentioned that because the judge in court said, “This is 245p. Why didn’t you put one of those on?”
Shabbir Halai [37:29]
So in BNI I do short – as you probably know they’re short presentations – sometimes mentioning problems in court.
Shabbir Halai [37:42]
I did a presentation recently where I took a brick in. I said to the people in the room – there were 60 businesses – “Right, I’m going to show you how to swallow this brick.”
Shabbir Halai [37:55]
I got it ready – it was a proper house brick – got it ready. “What?” But I couldn’t. I couldn’t swallow it.
Shabbir Halai [38:02]
But three days earlier in the paper there was a story about a guy who’d swallowed a full brick’s worth of dust in 10 years of his working life because he didn’t wear a dust mask.
Shabbir Halai [38:14]
And that’s how you swallow a brick – not wearing a dust mask over 10 years. Do you really want that inside you, or would you wear a £1.25 dust mask?
Shabbir Halai [38:29]
So the ways of conveying health and safety – I probably do it in a bit of a quirky way because I like to get people’s attention.
Shabbir Halai [38:34]
People aren’t interested in the fine or the jail sentence. I find simple ways to engage people, enlighten them, and I love it.
Shabbir Halai [38:46]
My team love health and safety. I can’t say we make it fun, but I want to be slightly different. I want people to engage.
Shabbir Halai [38:54]
Unfortunately most health and safety people, by me, are quite boring. They’re quite droll. They’ll quote you regulations and subsections. I’m not interested in that.
Shabbir Halai [39:00]
I want to know the outcome for you. If I go to you and you’re a restaurant, I’m going to give you the fire risk assessment you need, food safety order you need, a simple risk assessment you need, and do some training for your workers.
Shabbir Halai [39:13]
Then give you some toolbox talks you can do yourself once a month – some internal training – and we refresh that every year so it’s in date.
Shabbir Halai [39:25]
Most of our clients are happy with that. They call in and email with problems. We love dealing with those.
Shabbir Halai [39:31]
Yeah, I think that’s how we try and make safety a bit more engaging.
Shabbir Halai [39:39]
With my networking group, I take in my glass mystic ball sometimes. This amazing mystic ball.
Shabbir Halai [39:47]
I look into it and it’s rather like – this is the equivalent of our health and safety audits.
Shabbir Halai [39:53]
You’ve got this ball. I go on site with a health and safety audit. I can predict the accident potential for that site.
Shabbir Halai [39:59]
It’s so easy. A health and safety audit will look at a range of things – 82 different things – and that’s a prediction of this site.
Shabbir Halai [40:05]
It’s like Mystic Meg. It really is easy.
Shabbir Halai [40:13]
This is what can go wrong with your site if you don’t do this.
Shabbir Halai [40:20]
I went to a site recently – a car garage. It had some steps up to the rear fire exit, but the fire exit was chained and all the steps were full of chemicals.
Shabbir Halai [40:32]
It doesn’t take an expert to tell you that if there was a fire, how are you going to get out that door? It’s full of flammable chemicals, it’s chained.
Shabbir Halai [40:45]
We spot those. A health and safety audit – I love those – because it spots the potential.
Shabbir Halai [40:51]
If an inspector had got there before me, the fire inspector probably would have served a closure notice.
Shabbir Halai [40:58]
They often do when fire exits are chained. Or if they were lenient, they would have said, “Unchain it now,” and then given them a stern letter.
Shabbir Halai [41:10]
If we can get there before the inspector, we’re going to save you lots of money and lots of time.
Shabbir Halai [41:16]
But my good takeaway is that education – that little bit of education for the director and the company. I love doing that.
Shabbir Halai [41:22]
I’ll tell you one quick story which I really enjoyed because I come from engineering, as you know. I make things. I love workshops – we’ve got workshops, factories, warehouses, garages.
Shabbir Halai [41:28]
I like those sorts of businesses. Went to this woodworking shop. The director signed up. Wasn’t totally convinced I don’t think, but had an accident, signed up.
Shabbir Halai [41:49]
He said, “Would you come in once a month and do training with all the guys out there in the workshop?” “Yeah, of course I would. I’d love doing that.”
Shabbir Halai [41:54]
So I went in the first month. In the workshop, all the tools. Seven guys like that. One got a cigarette out, started sparking it up.
Shabbir Halai [42:06]
I’m like, “You know it’s illegal to smoke inside the workshop?”
Shabbir Halai [42:11]
I could tell from the glazed-over eyes they weren’t really engaging. But I went through my spiel, did some Q&A, forced them to talk to me with simple answers. Not much engagement.
Shabbir Halai [42:24]
Next month – bit better. But they didn’t smoke inside this time.
Shabbir Halai [42:30]
Third month – I got there. One of the guys had chopped the tip of his finger off.
Shabbir Halai [42:37]
He said, “Shabbir, you know what, it’s completely my fault. I can’t believe it. I heard you saying about gloves, and I knew I should have used a push stick. It was the final cut – all the things you hear about the accident. It’s just the final thing you’re going to do.”
Shabbir Halai [42:49]
But the others were more engaged. By month five, the director emailed me. He said, “Shabbir, I don’t know what you’ve done to my workers. They’re coming to me asking for PPE. They’ve asked for safety signs to go up. They’re now putting the guards up. They’ve repaired the guards.”
Shabbir Halai [43:09]
It’s just little and often. And if you can engage with them – it took a little while for me to get engagement with them – it works.
Shabbir Halai [43:17]
And the director now loves walking around and doing a health and safety inspection. He also makes his other supervisors walk around. It can’t just be one person checking things.
Shabbir Halai [43:25]
That incremental safety just went up nice and slow. By month nine it was just amazing. I loved it.
Shabbir Halai [43:37]
And the one incident they had – he admitted it was completely his fault. He didn’t put a claim in or anything.
Darren Jamieson [43:43]
That’s interesting – the approach you’ve got there. Because I think it makes a difference, doesn’t it?
Darren Jamieson [43:48]
If you’ve got a health and safety person that is extremely dull, very confrontational – “This is the rule, this is the way you should be doing it, do it this way or I’m going to cite you” – people are just going to kick back against it.
Darren Jamieson [44:01]
But if you do what you did – you get them engaged, you get them on board, you get them to believe it’s for them, not for you, not for rules and regulations, not for the government, not for the Health and Safety Executive – it’s for them.
Darren Jamieson [44:13]
They buy into it, there’ll be fewer accidents, and you’re going to save more lives.
Shabbir Halai [44:18]
Yeah. For us, in our team, we often say in training: What is health and safety to you? What does it mean? We get a range of answers, but health and safety to us is workers going to work, doing their work, and going home in the same condition as they arrived. No aches and pains, no broken bones, no cut fingers. Health and safety is just being as simple as that.
Shabbir Halai [44:41]
The spin‑off of that is that the company can’t get prosecuted and the director can’t go to jail or be fined. That’s a spin‑off of good health and safety.
Shabbir Halai [44:54]
And it means you don’t have pain or inconvenience. If I think of all the accidents I’ve been told about in my working life, without doubt it’s not just been an accident. It’s been pain for that person and then huge inconvenience.
Shabbir Halai [45:06]
Let’s say they’ve broken a leg. They can’t take the dog for a walk now. When they go for physio, they’ve got to take a cab instead of walking and it’s cost them more money. The inconvenience is incredible. It’s pain and inconvenience.
Shabbir Halai [45:18]
That’s why I say to employees: You might think you’ll get a massive payout. You don’t.
Shabbir Halai [45:25]
In the thousands of people I’ve trained, I remember probably three instances where an employee has got a payout – an actual real payout.
Shabbir Halai [45:31]
One of those – a lady had slipped and broken her leg at work because the floor was very slippery and not cleaned correctly. She took the company to court.
Shabbir Halai [45:44]
It takes about two and a half years to get to court normally if you put a claim in. In those two and a half years, she spent £5,000 on physio and medication.
Shabbir Halai [46:00]
In court she won. The judge awarded her £35,000 compensation. And she hobbled out of court saying, “I wish I’d never had the accident.”
Shabbir Halai [46:11]
That’s what I find with most people – you’re not going to get this massive claim generally, and the accident will impact on your life.
Shabbir Halai [46:17]
So yeah – put the gloves on. Yeah – put the safety glasses on. Yeah – put the ear defenders in. Yeah – clean up that water or coffee spill. Or if you haven’t got time, ask someone else to.
Shabbir Halai [46:35]
That’s what I love about health and safety – it is so simple in most cases.
Darren Jamieson [46:42]
Which is exactly what it says on your banner: Simple.
Shabbir Halai [46:45]
Exactly.
Darren Jamieson [46:48]
Shabbir, we’re out of time. But I love that. I didn’t think health and safety would be so interesting. I knew the adverse part of it would be interesting, but I didn’t think health and safety itself would be so interesting.
Darren Jamieson [46:54]
Thank you for that. Thank you for teaching us that and for being so engaging on the subject as well. I can see why you do quite well within BNI for it.
Darren Jamieson [47:07]
And thank you for being on the podcast.
Shabbir Halai [47:10]
More than welcome. Thank you, Darren. Cheers.
[Music] [Applause]
