New regulations for minimum health and safety requirements on construction sites for employees have been announced, and form part of EU legislation.

Minister of EU Affairs Helena Dalli, together with OHSA CEO Mark Gauci and Permanent Secretary Joseph Camilleri presented the new legislation.

Dalli said that accidents on construction sites are often times serious. She said that the number of incidents are reducing, “however even if one person dies or suffers disability as a result of a construction site accident, it is too much. We will keep on working to avoid such incidents.”

She said that employers must ensure that safety equipment is provided, and workers must make use of this equipment.

The Permanent Secretary said that according to Eurostat, one of five fatal workplace accidents in the EU occur in construction. “We had one such fatal accident in Malta last year. Of all the accidents in the workplace locally, 15% were in construction,” he added.

This new legal notice introduces a number of new concepts, he said.

The OHSA CEO said that that this legislation  introduces more measures regarding scaffolding for example. One major change, he said, is that domestic site owners (where the owner will not be making any profit from the site), would no longer be responsible for the risk assessment, and the contractor would now need to handle this.

In addition, the idea of two project coordinators (one for design and one for implementation) has been done away with, with one project coordinator required to handle both jobs.