🥂Today I am proud to be celebrating the 25th anniversary of me starting my first health and safety role on 5 January 1999. This week also marks 17 years since I became a Chartered Safety and Health Professional.
Since then I have never looked back. For almost half of my life, I have worked tirelessly to ensure that people who go to work, go home in the same condition that they arrived in. Back in the early days, my remit included environmental issues too, but after a few years, that was dropped.
Working with, among others, Groundwork Trusts, Manchester City Council, Bury Council, and System Concepts; winning the SHP IOSH Consultant of the Year Award in 2009, and then setting up my own consultancy, KSH Safety Services, in 2017, it's been, and continues to be hard, but thoroughly enjoyable work.
Back in 1999, some of the now well known laws were fledgling or still being developed. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1992 were expanded into a 1999 version, and the now well known PUWER and LOLER were all but a few months old. And the main Health and Safety at Work, etc. Act, now aged 50, was only in its mid twenties. And the world was beginning to panic about the Y2K Millennium Bug. Remember that?
Thank you to everyone who has helped me along the way. They are far too many to mention but I really appreciate all the support that they have all given me over the past quarter of a century. Whether you have been a work colleague, a mentor, trainer, manager, customer, supplier, networker, family member, friend or general supporter, I genuinely could not have done it without you.
I still love what I do, and I look forward to continuing for many years to come, protecting Britain’s workforce and making employers better prepared, with a safer and healthier culture, and more safety compliant.
To everyone, a huge Thank You!