, Building
A roofer in Preston is replacing ridge tiles on a bungalow. It is a two hour job. The scaffold would take a day to erect and cost more than the work is worth, so he uses a ladder tied at the top and a roof ladder, and he is careful.
Two doors down, a different roofer on a similar job steps backwards onto a fragile rooflight covered by a sheet of ply that somebody had laid over it and not fixed. He falls four metres onto a concrete floor.
Falls from height have been at or near the top of the Health and Safety Executive's published fatal injury figures for construction for as long as those figures have been collected. They are not an exotic risk. They are the ordinary one.
The two metre rule does not exist
It is worth saying plainly because it is repeated on sites every week. The Work at Height Regulations 2005, in force from 6 April 2005, apply to work at any height where a person could fall a distance liable to cause personal injury. There is no minimum. A fall from the back of a flatbed, off a hop-up, or into an open excavation is within scope.
The regulations are built around a hierarchy, and the hierarchy is an order of preference, not a menu.
Avoid work at height where you reasonably can. Assemble on the ground and lift into place. Use an extending pole for cleaning or inspection. Design out the need.
Where you cannot avoid it, prevent the fall. That means a safe working platform with guard rails and toe boards: scaffold, a tower, a mobile elevating work platform, an existing edge protected properly. Collective protection, which protects everyone present without them having to do anything, comes before personal protection, which protects one person and only if they use it correctly.
Where you cannot prevent the fall, minimise the distance and consequences. Nets, soft landing systems, or a personal fall arrest system with a properly rated anchor and a rescue plan. A harness with nowhere to clip it is decoration, and a worker suspended in a harness with nobody able to reach them is a medical emergency within minutes, which is why the rescue plan is part of the system rather than an afterthought.
Fragile surfaces deserve their own paragraph, because they cause a steady stream of serious injuries. Asbestos cement roof sheets, rooflights, liner panels and old glazing will not take a person's weight. They must be covered with fixed, marked covers or protected with staging and edge protection, and every person on that roof must be told where they are. A sheet of ply laid loosely over a rooflight is worse than nothing because it hides the hazard.
Ladders are permitted, and the conditions are specific
The regulations do not ban ladders. Regulation 6 and Schedule 6 allow a ladder where a risk assessment has shown that the use of more suitable equipment is not justified because of the low risk and the short duration of use, or because of features of the site that cannot be altered.
HSE guidance treats short duration as a matter of minutes rather than hours, and commonly refers to around 30 minutes in one position as an indication rather than a limit. Light work, three points of contact, no overreaching, and the ladder secured, footed or otherwise prevented from slipping.
So the ladder question is not "is this allowed" but "can I say why". If an inspector asks, the answer needs to be a reason, given at the time, not a shrug. A five minute gutter inspection is a ladder job. A day of fascia replacement is not.
Towers and mobile platforms bring their own requirements. A tower must be erected by someone trained and competent to do it, braced and tied as the manufacturer specifies, with the platform boarded and guarded. Mobile elevating work platforms need an operator trained for that category of machine, an assessment of ground conditions, and awareness of the entrapment risk against overhead structures, which is the accident that kills MEWP operators.
Scaffolding has to be inspected on a schedule, and recorded
This is the part with hard numbers, and they are worth committing to memory.
Under regulation 12, a working platform used for construction work from which a person could fall two metres or more must be inspected in position before first use, after any substantial addition, dismantling or alteration, and after any event likely to have affected its stability, such as high winds or a vehicle strike. It must also be inspected at intervals not exceeding seven days.
The inspection is done by a competent person. A written report must be completed before the end of the working period, and a copy provided to the person for whom the inspection was carried out within 24 hours. That report has to be kept on site until the work is finished and then retained for three months.
Standard scaffolds are usually erected to a recognised configuration under the industry guidance known as TG20, with a compliance sheet handed over. Anything outside that, such as unusual loading, heavy debris netting, a bridged section or a temporary roof, needs a bespoke design by a competent scaffold designer. Sheeting and netting change the wind loading enormously, which is why an unsheeted scaffold that somebody wraps in monoflex without asking is a genuine collapse risk.
The scaftag on the standard is a helpful signal and not a legal record. The written report is the record.
Two more everyday duties. Nobody may alter a scaffold except a competent scaffolder, which includes removing a single board or a guard rail to get a window in. And ladders providing access to a scaffold lift must be tied and extend far enough above the platform to be stepped off safely.
What happens afterwards is more expensive than what prevented it
If someone falls, the immediate obligations are medical and then regulatory. Certain injuries are reportable to the HSE under RIDDOR 2013, including specified injuries such as fractures other than to fingers and toes, and any injury that keeps a worker away from their normal duties for more than seven consecutive days. Dangerous occurrences, including scaffold collapse, are reportable even where nobody is hurt.
The HSE can serve an improvement notice requiring a fault to be corrected, or a prohibition notice stopping the activity immediately, which on a site with a single access scaffold stops everything. Where an inspector finds a material breach, the HSE recovers its costs through Fee for Intervention at an hourly rate that it publishes and reviews periodically, and that recovery covers the investigation as well as the visit.
Prosecutions are sentenced under the Sentencing Council's guideline for health and safety offences, which sets fines by reference to culpability, the seriousness of the harm risked and the turnover of the organisation. Harm risked, not harm caused, which is why a near miss on a site with no edge protection can be sentenced seriously.
None of this includes the cost that lands first: the site closed, the programme gone, the insurance position, and a small firm where everybody knew the person who fell.
Where this shows up in the game
Scaffolding contractors and construction firms arrive in Business Baron with the Property & Construction Track, an add-on to the full game. Safety is a slow variable, and neglect raises the odds of an incident that costs you wages, an insurance excess and a visit from the authorities. Nothing about it is dramatic until it is, which is precisely why people cut it.