It must be safety first, last, always - Lesley McLeod

In Greece there has been rioting in the streets following the fatal rail crash on the line between Athens and Thessaloniki.

You may expect this sort of thing in the hot-headed Mediterranean but it’s not as common as television reports might suggest.

Less expected was that, in the crowds, people were waving banners in support of Turkish survivors of the recent earthquake there. Matching flags were being flown in Istanbul – no mean feat considering the normal distrust between these two countries.

Perhaps it was shared grief that unified the protesters. Or maybe – on both sides of the border – people were angry about perceived government inaction, indifference and graft making bad situations worse.

I take a keen interest in construction safety as I work for the Association for Project Safety [APS], a national professional body for people working to prevent and mitigate risk in our built environment.

So, I am interested in the fact that Greeks believe chronic infrastructure underinvestment was a factor in the tragedy.

And, in Turkey, that people think many more houses collapsed than ought to have been the case.

More than a month on people are still living and sleeping in the open. Feelings are running high as it seems the scale of the damage may be linked to poor building practices.

Turkish building safety regulations are tough and were beefed up as recently as 2018 after the last major quake. But enforcement is said to have been poor.

There are accusations that the authorities knew about substandard properties going up, turning both a blind eye and a fast buck as they pocketed fines for lapses in building standards.

It is estimated that around 75,000 properties obtained construction amnesties and an eye-watering 13 million or so buildings – a terrifying proportion of all properties in Turkiye – have been built in contravention of the country’s own laws.

I know it is practically a national pastime to mock health and safety. Practitioners do themselves no favours when they seem to worry more about conkers than – as with the Grenfell tragedy – preventing buildings from burning down.

But, at least for me, some of that indignation comes from just a wee bit of self-loathing that I know I am guilty of cutting corners and sometimes doing things I oughtn’t.

So, instead of railing against the rules, perhaps our focus should be on ensuring we don’t keep repeating our mistakes.

That, I suggest, comes down to a combination of things: information; enforcement; and an openness to owning up to where we went wrong.

There’s no end to all the things we can learn and skills we can acquire.

But it’s a bit of a pushmi-pullyu – remember that strange creature from Dr Dolittle? – conundrum: I’ll find out what I need to know and do but only when you make it easy for me by providing the training and information.

Even at that, I don’t think I’ll always stay on the side of the angels unless there’s a guy round the corner ready to pounce if I let things slide.

I am all for people who flout the rules facing severe fines. In construction it’s not for nothing it takes years to qualify as an architect – when all the talk is of aesthetics it is easy to lose sight of the fact that construction professionals hold our lives in their hands.

We must find better ways of sharing the lessons we learn when things do go wrong. No-one relishes looking like they’re an idiot in public – and, in our increasingly litigious society, we are often afraid to open up.

But, when safety is so often only a priority after the damage has been done, we need to find a way of getting ahead of the wave – before it washes us all away.

Lesley McLeod, CEO, Association for Project Safety