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Health and safety resource centre

1 December 2006

UCU's health and safety resource centre for members, safety reps and branch officers.

UCU health and safety support for members

For advice on a range of common hazards and health and safety issues please see our health & safety factsheets.

UCU health and safety support for reps

UCU produces an extensive range of fact sheets specifically for UCU health and safety reps as well as examples of good practice and useful tools. From time to time we will conduct surveys, issue press releases and contribute to wider discussion. Relevant documents can be found at the end of this page.

UCU health and safety team

UCU has a dedicated health and safety team offering help and support to branches and reps on any workplace health and safety issue including a health and safety advice line.

Keeping us informed

We need to keep our safety reps database as up to date as possible but we need your help to do this. If you are a new UCU health and safety rep please contact your regional office with your membership number and branch code if possible so that our central records can be updated.

Likewise, contact your regional office If you are no longer a H&S rep and/or do not wish to receive any further UCU health and safety information.

We hope you find this page useful. Please let us know if we can improve it in any way as your opinion is crucial.

Finally, thank you for your continued and consistent support. Remember this is your union and together we can make your workplace safer to work in.

Useful information


See: UCU coronavirus information, advice and resources


Sick of it? English FE negotiating pack

This guide is aimed at branch officers and activists involved in campaigning and negotiating on the issue of sick pay and sickness absence measures in further education in England. It is designed to give you practical information and suggestions to help you in your negotiations.

The Association of Colleges (AoC) unilaterally withdrew from the national joint agreement on guidelines on sickness leave in English FE colleges in December 2012. Since the withdrawal a number of colleges have reviewed their own sickness absence policies. Negotiations to try and re-establish the national agreement broke down in January 2014.

Sick of it? A practical guide to negotiating all aspects of sickness absence policies in further education, Feb 18 [300kb]


Asbestos

Asbestos checklist

The Joint Union Asbestos Committee (JUAC) campaigns to protect education workers and pupils from the dangers of asbestos in education buildings. All the education unions covering England and Wales, including UCU, are part of JUAC. Their goal is government-funded removal of asbestos from all educational buildings and until that happens, we do all we can to raise awareness of the dangers of asbestos and help schools and colleges manage it as safely as possible. This checklist was produced to help in this respect. [104kb]

All-party committee report on asbestos in schools

Many further and higher education (especially post-92 institutions) would have had similar sorts of prefab buildings as schools, left-over from the old local authority days. Despite lots of new build and selling-off since incorporation, some of these may still be in use. You can download the parliamentary all-party report here:

See also the related links below.

Useful links

The TUC has very useful  health and safety web pages and links to Risks, a regular weekly TUC bulletin for safety reps.

The excellent  Hazards website is packed with information. The website rides on the back of the excellent Hazards Magazine, and relies on subscriptions to the magazine for its existence - enquiries to sub@hazards.org.  

Hazards guide to activism produced for Worker's Memorial Day 2011:

Labour Research Department (LRD) provides a research and information service for trade unionists and publishes health & safety information in its monthly magazine, a monthly newsletter, and three or four pamphlets every year on health & safety issues, notably its annual Health and Safety law handbook which you can find by going to the LRD booklets page and clicking on 'LRD Booklets all issues' link. You will then see the LRD booklets for the current year, and can access the previous year if necessary using the links at the top of the page.

The  Health and Safety Executive (HSE) - use the A-Z link to see the main topics. The HSE produces a huge range of information from free leaflets, through periodicals, newsletters and a magazine, legislation with associated approved codes of practice, guidance notes, to booklets on specific issues and topics. Single copies of many leaflets are free; but priced publications can be expensive. They produce a free publications catalogue, annually updated, which lists all HSE publications. Order one from HSE Books on 01787 881165.

Last updated: 18 March 2024