The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) issued a bulletin (No. STSU1-2019) on the 7th February 2019 warning of new scientific evidence from the International Agency for Research on Cancer that exposure to mild steel welding fumes can cause lung cancer and possibly kidney cancer in humans.

The Workplace Health Expert Committee has endorsed the reclassification of mild steel welding fume as a human carcinogen.

Subsequently and with immediate effect, there is a strengthening of HSE’s enforcement expectation for all welding fume, including mild steel welding; because general ventilation does not achieve the necessary control.

The Health and Safety Executive safety alert can be viewed here: http://www.hse.gov.uk/safetybulletins/mild-steel-welding-fume.htm

Immediate action is required now to ensure that employees, workers, employers, owners, managers and directors or contractors’ undertaking welding activities in any industry are aware of the risks, expectations, outcomes and actions that are now required, as detailed below:

Outcome:

-Control of the cancer risk will require suitable engineering controls for all welding activities indoors e.g. Local Exhaust Ventilation (LEV). Extraction will also control exposure to manganese, which is present in mild steel welding fume, which can cause neurological effects similar to Parkinson’s disease.

-Where LEV alone does not adequately control exposure, it should be supplemented by adequate and suitable respiratory protective equipment (RPE) to protect against the residual fume.

-Appropriate RPE should be provided for welding outdoors. You should ensure welders are suitably instructed and trained in the use of these controls.

-Regardless of duration, HSE will no longer accept any welding undertaken without any suitable exposure control measures in place, as there is no known level of safe exposure.

-Risk assessments should reflect the change in the expected control measures.

Action required:

-Make sure exposure to any welding fume released is adequately controlled using engineering controls (typically LEV).

-Make sure suitable controls are provided for all welding activities, irrelevant of duration. This includes welding outdoors.

-Where engineering controls alone cannot control exposure, then adequate and suitable RPE should be provided to control risk from any residual fume.

-Make sure all engineering controls are correctly used, suitably maintained and are subject to thorough examination and test where required.

-Make sure any RPE is subject to an RPE programme. An RPE programme encapsulates all the elements of RPE use you need to ensure that your RPE is effective in protecting the wearer.

Clearly welding and cutting can be extremely dangerous if you are not correctly protected, there are a variety of chemicals which when melted can create dangerous substances. The dangerous substances and radiation generated during the welding process can be extremely hazardous to a welders’ health.

There are a variety of brands including Kemper, Parweld and Electac which provide protective equipment for welders. Our largest supplier of welding and cutting protection is Kemper who are pioneers and a leader in the technology of the welding smoke extraction industry

If you require guidance or assistance on what welding fume extraction system is suitable for your requirements please call us (01623) 645 645 or email us on [email protected]

Tell us about your company?

Based in Mansfield Hall-Fast are a proud family business which I started from the back bedroom of the family home in August 2006, we have come a long way since and now supply a standard range of 200,000 items (650,000+ part numbers) to a growing customer base of 45,000+ companies in 92 overseas markets.

Our rapid growth has been based on supplying SME’s and large manufacturing and wholesale customers Worldwide backed with an online based business model which enables us to keep our costs low and therefore pass on huge savings to our customers on the industrial supplies and equipment, specialist fasteners, workwear, tools, PPE and janitorial items which they were purchasing from our large multinational competitors.

Tell us briefly about your export history?

At the height of the recession in 2009 when our core UK markets were depressed, with the guidance and support of the DIT I decided to diversify and start to export as I saw this as a huge opportunity for us, the traditional route to exporting within our sectors was to undertake market visits and set up commercial agreements with local distributors however we neither had the time or the finance to do this.

I foresaw the huge growth in the internet that we see today so we initially focussed on adding as much technical information on our products to our website, added part numbers within our titles and added keywords to product pages and we made it clear to potential customers overseas that we could export our product ranges globally and importantly we took the decision to supply companies directly and not via local distributors subsequently our prices were very competitive and we started to see enquiries and sales coming through almost immediately; this approach was pretty pioneering and proven to be very successful for us.

What have been the main challenges and breakthroughs?

We have overcome a few major challenges since I started the business, firstly the recession of 2008 and then back in December 2016 we had a huge setback when development work on our old website caused unrepairable damaged, at the time we had twelve multilingual international websites which were linked into the one database backend, we had huge issues with prices on our international websites being different to the UK website and we also lost years of organic search listings when the Location Based Indexing hreflang tag on our UK website www.hall-fast.com was changed to tell Google to show our Irish website to visitors in the UK.

In January 2017 I took the decision to invest heavily in a new Magento based website with a fully integrated Datafile ERP software system, this decision has really pushed the business forward as our website is now fully integrated with our accounts, stock, CRM and order processing making it almost fully automated, this means that we can process an unlimited amount of orders quickly enabling us to aggressively target markets sectors Worldwide.

Over the last six months sales have grown by 87 per cent with export sales accounting for circa 40 per cent.

What single piece of advice would you give to someone looking to export?

There are huge opportunities for UK SME’s to export but I think that potential new exporters are put off as they believe it to be difficult, trading overseas is as easy as trading within the UK, however no two overseas markets are the same so it is important to understand the trading terms and the documentation requirements for each enquiry or order that they receive, the DIT are always on hand to assist as are the Chamber of Commerce with this support the opportunities in overseas markets are endless.

For more info, visit www.hall-fast.com or https://www.insidermedia.com/blogs/midlands/business-matters-trading-internationally-challenges-and-breakthroughs 

Hall-Fast’s founder and Managing Director Malcolm Hall has been invited to join the All-Party Parliamentary Corporate Responsibility Group (APCRG)

Hall-Fast were recently chosen as the Mansfield Constituency Responsible Business Champion by local MP Ben Bradley and subsequently were named in the top 20 UK responsible businesses alongside sports clubs and major multi-national companies including overall winner BAE Systems.

The APCRG group’s purpose is to promote debate and understanding of corporate responsibility, by holding events each year in which the current 94 Parliamentarians and 80 non-Parliamentarians can exchange views on relevant, topical issues, recent meetings have covered subjects such as business-education partnerships; inclusive employment policies; health and well-being in the workplace; responsible investment; employee engagement and well-being; corporate reputation and risk; corporate reporting; and the use of procurement policies to promote responsible behaviour. Future meetings will focus re- skilling Britain t-levels, work placements, apprenticeships & other skills training.

Commenting Malcolm said – ‘’As a relatively small independent family run business I am immensely proud that the success of Hall-Fast has enabled us to give back to the communities in and around Mansfield and further afield through community based sponsorship with sports clubs including Paviors Rugby and Nottingham Rugby’s Community Department where delivery of high quality coaching into primary and secondary schools and also Mansfield’s Fountaindale SEN school has helped to promote rugby locally and also the benefits of an healthy lifestyle and wellbeing, and I look forward to being able to have the platform to put across my views within this parliamentary group.

In March 2017 Malcolm was appointed as an Export Champion in an ambassadorial role by the Cabinet Office to promote exporting to other SME’s and was made an MBE in the 2016 New Year’s Honours for his services to business.