The Road Safety Markings Association (RSMA) has been praised for 'extraordinary leadership' in its contribution to raising levels of competence in the civil engineering sector.
Alasdair Reisner, chief executive of the Civil Engineering Contractors Association (pictured), addressed the RSMA conference this month on the subject of securing competence for the highways workforce, stating: 'I am not here to tell you about it. I am here to thank the RSMA for the extraordinary leadership it has shown in this space.
'The work that you have been doing is outstanding and I want to pay tribute to you as an organisation.'
Mr Reisner has taken on a key role in the ongoing competence agenda in infrastructure, which developed from the aftermath of the Grenfell tragedy in 2017, in which 72 people lost their lives when a fire started in a high rise building in West London.
'One of the key issues with Grenfell is there were people doing jobs they were not competent to do. As an industry, in 2018 we started to think about how we can get a better grip of competence. The aim is to respond to the recommendations that came out of Dame Judith Hackitt's post-Grenfell report.'
Mr Reisner is helping organise competence frameworks for each aspect of the civil engineering sector – designated a 'super sector' within infrastructure.
Different bodies are writing the frameworks covering what it means for an operative to be competent, with the RSMA making strong progress on developing the road marking framework within the civils super sector.
Mr Reisner was quick to stress that this latest work would 'not start unpicking things that are already there, like Sector Scheme 7 [an existing quality management system covering road markings]. So I think it will be working with them and reinforcing rather than putting them to the side. I think it will be for individual super sectors to decide what good looks like.
'We are really grateful to everyone who has got involved and driven this forward. The RSMA is further ahead than others who had a couple of years head start. It grasped this and has taken leadership. They established a working group, working with national highways sector scheme and have put questionnaires in place.'
He concluded that while the agenda will become law in buildings, 'I think this will be demanded as the expected standard in industry elsewhere too, that you must deliver and if you don’t you don’t get to play anymore. I am not saying that will happen to tomorrow but I think it will become custom and practice.'
