Issue - meetings

Kevin Gibb, Executive Director: Delivery presented the Health & Safety Assessment report to the committee.

As required by any good employer the council had a duty of care under Health and Safety legislation for ensuring the wellbeing of staff. Due to the pandemic with the majority of staff having had to change their working environment and ways of working, the council was required to update everyone’s risk assessments. For employees who used computers as part of their work a new Display Screen Assessments (DSE) had to be undertaken and for home and remote workers, risk assessments had been updated to reflect the increased time working away from the main offices. The assessments had allowed corporately to understand the issues employees faced whilst working from home, and to monitor staff’s wellbeing.

There had been good compliance across the council in undertaking the assessments. Quite early on in the process it was realised that staff required proper desks, chairs and large screens at home, and a large exercise was undertaken with the facilities team and IT to ensure these items were delivered to staff at their homes.

A further challenge had been with the staff, due to the nature of their jobs, who were still going in and out of people’s homes throughout the pandemic of vulnerable people, which had been a complex situation with the risk to staff needing to be managed closely Work had been untaken closely with Public Health England in regards to the negative effect Covid-19 had had with on the Black, Asian, and

minority ethnic (BAME) communities.

It was expected that when government changed to return to office it would be very different, as it would need to be covid secure for a period of time and both home and office assessments may need to be updated. For those working in the community, the risk assessments may need to be updated once the vaccination programme picked up pace.  It had been noted that the percentage of returns for the home working assessments in the  People Directorate, but it was a working assumption that those were working in the community, but a  further piece of work would be undertaken to ensure there was no gaps in the data.

RESOLVED that the Committee consider and endorse the next step identified in section 6 of the Executive Director: Delivery’s report.