Wednesday 31 March 2010

LegalCheck.mdb version 2.0 available

For those of our clients who are using INTACT to manage health, safety and enviornmental issues, there's an updated version of LegalCheck.mdb.
This is available from the information page on our website and may be downloaded as a zipped file. Simply unzip it and replace the existing copy of LegalCheck.mdb. There are instructions when you open it.

Open the information page
.
LegalCheck.zip is under Files.

Fire Safety (Employees' Capabilities) (England) Regulations 2010 come into force

From 6 April 2010, new regulations will clarify your responsibilities to consider the capabilities of your workers to carry out any fire safety-related tasks or assignments.

These regulations (which comprise just a single sentence) mean that you will have to think about:

1. What a worker is able and unable to do when giving them tasks
2. How these capabilities may affect their ability to deal with fire-related risks

For example, you will have to consider a worker's capabilities as regards fire safety if you ask them to work with petrol.

These regulations should not impose any extra burden on your business. They simply re-impose a duty that:

* You had before the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 came into force in October 2006
* Is implicit in your wider health and safety duties

You are reminded that you continue to have a general duty to:

1. Carry out a fire safety risk assessment to identify the general fire precautions you need to put in place
2. Regularly review the assessment and make any necessary changes
3. Pay particular attention to young people when carrying out or reviewing a risk assessment

See more about health and safety services

FSC-STD-50-001, Requirements for Use of the FSC Trademarks by Certificate Holders come into effect.

The new Forest Stewardship Council trademark standard, FSC-STD-50-001, Requirements for Use of the FSC Trademarks by Certificate Holders came into effect on 1st March 2010, it will become mandatory as of 1st January 2011.

On-product and off-product requirements as well as graphic rules are now in a single standard, replacing the 3 documents previously used.

The most significant change is the introduction of new trademark protection symbols and new label and logo designs, which include trademark license codes instead of certificate registration numbers.

More details are available from the link below which also provides an update of 5.1 cbpA FSC Rules for companies for whom SSS have developed FSC systems.

See more information

Thursday 18 March 2010

New FSC Standard

Sorry chaps,
The Forest Stewardship Council have introduced a new standard covering the use of trademarks. ie their logo.
This is FSC-STD-50-001.
I'll be doing an explanation of this on the SSS website so watch it for updates. It will be in the Useful Information section.

Wednesday 17 March 2010

Hunts get ISO 9001 certification

Congratulations to Hunts, People in Print, who we have helped gain certification to ISO 9001:2008. This is in addition to the FSC, PEFC and ISO 14001 certification we helped them with ealier.
See ISO Without the Agony

Friday 5 March 2010

EN 60204-1 not harmonised to Machinery Directive

At the time of writing EN 60204-1 Safety of machinery. Electrical equipment of machines. General requirements, which is generally considered to be one of the key machinery safety standards, is not harmonised to the Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC.
See article.

Pleural plaques not a casue for compensation.

People with pleural plaques – small, symptomless areas of fibrosis
found in the lung, caused by exposure to asbestos – will not be able
to claim compensation, according to the Government recently.
A Law Lords’ ruling in October 2007, which upheld a Court of Appeal judgement that the existence of pleural plaques does not constitute actionable damage, caused huge controversy, leading the Government to publish a consultation paper to assess whether it should overturn the judgement, or pursue other options to support people diagnosed with the condition.
See full article.