Helping to keep national computer gaming festivals safe

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We are delighted to have been appointed Health and Safety contractor to some of the UK’s biggest computer gaming festivals.

SoPro Safety Ltd will advise Multiplay UK Ltd, a subsidiary of Game, on event health and safety for Insomnia, Brick Live and games publisher conventions such as Minecon. Event venues include Birmingham’s NEC, London’s Excel and Belfast’s Titanic Exhibition Centre. The increasingly popular shows attract up to 50,000 consumers, many of them families and young people.

SoPro Safety is headed by Jon Sullivan, an experienced Health and Safety professional whose previous event work has included venues at the 2012 Olympic Games and the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, International art shows in London and World Skills, International.

As well as event work SoPro Safety offers a full compliance, advice and outsource service for Health and Safety as well as a number of unique, dynamic training courses.

Commenting on the appointment Multiplay UK Ltd’s Events Director, Andrew Smith said “We are delighted to have Jon Sullivan, and SoPro Safety, on board. Their experience of events coupled with an extensive knowledge of Health and Safety is invaluable to Multiplay. Jon Sullivan manages the implementation of our Health and Safety in a professional and pragmatic manner, enabling our team to work safely and offer a low risk environment to our visitors”.

Fees for Intervention

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If the Health & Safety Executive visit your workplace and find that you are in material breach of health and safety law, you will have to pay for the time it takes them to identify what is wrong and to help you put things right. If you don’t break the law, you won’t pay anything.

How much it costs

It currently costs £129 an hour. The fee will include the costs covering the time of the entire original visit. The total amount recovered will be based on the amount of time it takes HSE to identify the breach and help you put things right (including associated office work), multiplied by the hourly rate.

Your fee may include the inspector’s time:

  • at your business or workplace
  • preparing reports
  • getting specialist advice
  • talking to you after the visit
  • talking to your workers

The fee can vary depending on:

  • how long the original visit was
  • the time the inspector spent helping you put things right
  • the time it took the inspector to investigate your case
  • any time we spend on taking action against you

So, the modest cost of advice from SoPro could be money well invested.

Contract

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SoPro Safety are proud to announce that they have been appointed as the outsourced health and safety resource for Multiplay UK Ltd.

Multiplay are the organisers of the UK’s biggest computer gaming festival – Insomnia, as well as Brick Live and game developer conventions such as Minecon.  The business is an events, esports and digital hosting business now in its 20th year and recently acquired by GAME Retail Ltd.

    

The 12 month contract will be delivered by Director Jon Sullivan.

Minecon 2015

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Parachute Group (now SoPro Safety) provided health and safety advice services and the on-site safety presence for Multiplay UK Ltd while they were organising the biggest independent game convention for Mojang.  The event was for 10,000 fans of Minecraft who descended on Excel, London over the July weekend in 2015.

New regulations to include Events and Exhibitions

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The new Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 (CDM Regs) come into force in April.  Events and exhibitions of scale will fall within the scope of these regulations and the HSE is drafting guidance specifically for the events industry.  The draft regulations have been published, however the exact impact on our events and exhibitions industry is still taking shape.

We expect there to be better formalisation of the responsibilities of the client and their appointed organisers and/or main contractors.  For well run projects this should be a fairly simple matter to comply…

From the HSE:

The new CDM Regs come into force on 6 April 2015 and apply to all building and construction projects, regardless of the size, duration and nature of the work.

The main changes, outlined in general by the Health & Safety Executive, are as follows:

  • Principal designer. The replacement of CDM co-ordinator (under CDM 2007) by principal designer. This means that the responsibility for  coordination of the pre-construction phase – which is crucial to the management of any successful construction project – will rest with an existing member of the design team. 
  • Client. The new Regulations recognise the influence and importance of the client as the head of the supply chain and as the party best placed to set standards throughout a project 
  • Competence. By splitting ‘competence’ into its component parts of skills, knowledge, training and experience, and  – if they are an organisation – organisational capability, provides clarity for the industry to assess and demonstrate that construction project teams have the right attributes to deliver a healthy and safe project. 
  • The technical standards set out in Part 4 remain essentially unchanged from CDM 2007 and HSE’s targeting and enforcement policy, as a proportionate and modern regulator, also remains unchanged.

The Regulatory package

The new proposed Regulations and supporting guidance are all in draft form before they come into force and may be subject to changes. They offer duty holders the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the main requirements before they come into force.

Health and Safety update

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We recently gained a fascinating insight into the current and probable changes that are taking place with health and safety legislation and the work of the Health and Safety Executive.

Suffice to say with their budget being cut by the order of a third that the effect is best summed up as – fewer inspections, increased costs from interventions, jailing of senior management in prosecuted cases and higher profile/higher value prosecutions.

As an indication we understand that the HSE’s budget for FFI was about £30m – they only recovered a third of this so expect bigger fines to be levied. The FFI initiative is here to stay and may extend to local authority departments to engage in the interventions. The average fee for intervention was billed as approximately £490 but one case lead to a fee of £21,000.

Food for thought.

If you wish to talk about what it might mean for you please contact us.

Glasgow 2014

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Billed as the safest Games ever delivered – the XX Commonwealth Games.2014-08-06 23.48.25

Jon Sullivan had the pleasure of working with the Trivandi team supporting the Organising Committee to provide assurance and safety advice to the venues in the challenging time of Bump-In, Games Time, Bump-Out and the start of Re-Instatement and hand back to the Principle Contractor in the city.

The venue Jon worked on was the Scotstoun Sports Campus which was the most complex Glasgow venue – being a training venue for Triathlon and athletics from 13 July, plus a competition venue for Squash and table Tennis for the whole 11 days of the Games from 24 July to 3 August.  The site’s unique feature was a purpose-built, all glass squash court with arena seating within a temporary demountable structure.