Sign Firms Condemned on Their Own Websites, Author Claims
01 September 2008
The author of a no-holds barred expose book on the sign industry says that some sign maintenance and sign installation firms claiming good health and safety credentials, have pictures on their websites clearly demonstrating multiple breaches of health and safety rules and best practice.
Steve Martin, managing director of installation and maintenance firm Xmo Strata and author of Safety Quality Tricks and Lies: dirty tricks in the British sign industry and 100 questions your sign company doesn't want you to ask, says that awareness of health and safety rules in the sign industry is so lacking that clear breaches of the law are frequently shown in company marketing materials.
“One firm has 25 pictures on its website, and nine of them show practices which are actually illegal, or clearly breach well established best practice,” he said. “It is a large sign company and elsewhere on the same site it makes claims about its rigid adherence to health and safety procedures.”
Mr Martin said that he is ‘frustrated’ that the industry has “consistently failed to understand legal requirements which are really not very complicated or onerous.”
“Health and safety is still seen by some of these firms as a marketing thing, something you talk about but don't actually do unless you are forced into it,” he said.
“I find it staggering that sign companies are so ignorant of the law, or so careless of it, that even on their own websites they can't get simple things right - the Working at Height Regulations, for example - despite the fact that they are boasting about their adherence to these things in text which sits almost alongside the offending pictures. If it were not a matter of life and death, or at least potentially serious injury, it would be funny.”
He won't name the offending companies, because to do so would be to risk the accusation that he was also using health and safety as a competitive issue. “But these things are really not difficult to find. If you visit the websites of a dozen sign firms you'll find health and safety breaches illustrated on several of them,” he said.
“Ours is not the only company that takes this seriously but there are far too many that don't. We've taken ‘screen grabs‘ of some of the offending sites, so we have a record of them, but we won't be taking any other action. Good practice is to point these things out to the people concerned, but there are so many it isn't realistic to expect us to be calling them all up.”