As I see it, the new regulatory guidance, arising initially from EU rules concerning system scaffolding, is an unnecessary handicap to the tubular scaffolding industry. The initial reason for reviewing UK scaffolding design rules was the political objective of aligning us with Europe but the most significant change is in the way the new rules were presented to bring about a much more rigid application of them than ‘user friendly’ BS:5973 did with the old ones.
I spent about 30 incident-free years pricing and managing scaffolding contracts on a commonsense basis with a few basic design rules in my head and requesting design input when I judged it was needed. I then left the operational side of the game for a time and what a shock I got when I returned and had to come to terms with TG20:08 which appears to have so little regard for its users on the operational/commercial management side of the business. A long list of high profile check boxes for clients and regulators to tic has appeared together with a minefield of liabilities and costs for scaffolding firms., especially the smaller ones without in-house designers.
Commonsense judgement has been thrown out of the window and we get high profile definitions of a multitude of specific ‘special structures’ with a cautiously low ceiling above which they should all be subject to ‘structural calculations’ or ‘special design’ and we have gone from the 106 pages of BS:5973 to the 243 pages of TG20:08. As for ‘S’ [the wind factor] …beyond commonsense decisions as to whether a design was necessary due to location / height / sheeting ….I never had to think about wind this much in all my 30 years of structural failure-free trading [except after a night in the pub!].
Missing from TG20:08 are clear definitions of exactly what ‘structural calculation’ means as opposed to ‘special design’ and a section directly and constructively addressing the subject of ‘generic design’ to make it more of an acceptable option. But the word ‘generic’ does not appear once in TG20:08 which confirms to me that it was written without the concept of ease of use on the horizon and with no regard for cost and efficiency.
It is also poorly explained in many places e.g. Vol 2 Appendix A header [pp 172-219] ‘Site in town, more than 2km upwind from site’…. ? …...and there are typing errors which need correcting [e.g. Vol 1 - Figure 42 on page 19 – ‘Refer to Flow Chart ..[page 179]’ should be 171… all evidence to me that it was not edited for user-feedback in its final stages.
In the real world some scaffolding firms and their clients must be co-operating in ignoring the onerous new rules to some extent in order to preserve the operational efficiency of their work together. I have also received the view that some larger firms with in-house designers [NASC firms?] welcome the restrictive new regime as it reduces competition from the small guys. If either of these is the case then TG20:08 is not doing the job it should be and which BS:5973 was. Bottom line -’ If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.
