Kirklees Borough Council

Kirklees Council’s Health and Safety processes are managed at service level, leading to inconsistencies in how Health and Safety is managed across the district. The same circumstances and challenges would apply to many local authorities. Within Operational Services there are significant numbers of Risk Assessments, COSHH Records, Toolbox Talks, training records and other key documents which are primarily recorded on paper and shared with hundreds of employees each requiring a personal copy.

Because Health and Safety documents are legally required to be regularly reviewed, managing paper records during a period financial review is putting a strain on already stretched resources needed to manage Health and Safety.

Keeping employees safe in the operations of refuse collection, street sweeping, grounds maintenance and highways is crucial to ensuring compliance with legislation and delivering high quality, safe services to the public. The reduction of accidents also reduces absence from work and ensures efficient services continue to be delivered to local residents.

During the Discovery process the health and safety team aims to understand, the current limitations of existing processes and research the benefits which can be rolled out across the Council.

We want to:

-Identify the benefits and opportunities of using a digital process for manging Health and Safety records.

-Understand what technologies would be most efficient for sharing and issuing Health and Safety documents, including external organisations and volunteer groups.

-Discover opportunities of using existing IT infrastructure within the Council to develop a digital process atomisation process for reviewing and issuing documents.

-Produce assets that will be reusable by other local authorities.