In safe hands with Hosking Associates
Featured in Building and Facilities News Issue 959 on page 21
Lansac offers design and construction solutions for large new build or residential refurbishment projects – working as the main contractor for some of the UK’s leading property developers and investors.
The company manages everything from retail fit-outs to assisted living and care homes and hotel refurbishments and they are proud to be delivering complex projects across the UK and Europe.
Jakub Safarcik, managing director, comments: “We work closely with our clients and try to have a really good feel of what they need and the required specifications. We then try to deliver exactly to those needs.”
Getting it right from a health and safety perspective
As Jakub is clear to point out, there are many legal obligations when it comes to health and safety within the construction industry. There is a real need to run things exactly and properly in order to avoid accidents and ensure workers remain healthy. He comments:
“With any project, but especially bigger projects which require more research, you really cannot cut corners when it comes to health and safety. As such, as we have grown, I have chosen to make health and safety an integral part of the business.”
Working with Hosking Associates
As Jakub advises, health and safety has always been very important for the company, but in 2015 as the company started to work on an increasing number of larger projects they decided to appoint an outside consultancy to support. They selected Hosking Associates, who initially did a review of all the insurances and policies in place.
Immediately, Hosking Associates implemented a system to highlight how health and safety operations should run. A great deal of work was completed upfront, ensuring the correct systems, arrangements, procedures and processes were in place.
Jakub Safarcik: “The work that Hosking Associates has completed has been invaluable. Their knowledge is extensive, and we are now acutely aware of all of our health and safety obligations – on every level. We feel empowered and ready to ask the right questions when it comes to a new project.
We are construction professionals and cannot possibly have the levels of knowledge required to ensure health and safety is being delivered to the highest standard. We, therefore, knew we had to work with a company like Hosking Associates to ensure we could get this 100% right.”
Louise Hosking, Hosking Associates, comments: “As an occupational safety and health advisory service we like to work closely alongside teams. We help create a journey, improving standards at every level, over time, so it becomes a thread which runs through all decisions from the Board room to those on the ground. This is a key-value, which in turn creates a healthier, safer and more sustainable place to work and an ethical way to do business.”
Daily operations run smoothly
Working closely with Hosking, the team at Lansac will look at a site’s specific requirements. They then bring in the relevant people to manage the work – often the site’s foreman who will manage all aspects of health and safety. They are briefed on a project and provided access to the relevant files, set up in conjunction with the health and safety team.
In the case of larger more complex projects, Hosking will go onsite and help to create a construction phase plan. This will cover everything off including: first aiders, facilities, transport and onsite management teams. The client then approves this plan before implementation.
In safe hands
Jakub Safarcik: “We have an assigned adviser with Hosking Associates and that doesn’t change, so they know our business very well. It also means we can pick up the phone at any time and they will have the answer to any queries we may have. They are also hugely flexible on time, increasing it when needed on larger projects and scaling back when business is not as busy.
In essence, we are now really trying to scale our own business and we feel in very safe hands when it comes to ensuring our operations run with as little risk as possible.”
Lansac hopes to continue working with the team at Hosking Associates, and indeed to increase their support time over the next few years.
Jakub Safarcik: “Having a health and safety team on board helps us to save so much time; they add so much value and are helping to future-proof the company for the years ahead.”
Louise Hosking: “It has been great to watch Lansac grow with health and safety at its core, to develop and embrace this as a normal way to work.”
