Health and safety champions Gordon and Jan Anderson step back

NEW BEGINNINGS. Hasmates directors Gordon Anderson and Jan Anderson with marketing manager Rachel Bell (middle). Photo / Paul Taylor

After championing worker safety across New Zealand for the past 25 years, two Napier-based health and safety consultants are looking to take a well-earned rest.

However, decades of knowledge and experience will not be lost.

Gordon and Jan Anderson have put their combined years of experience into a software programme to make it easier for businesses to manage health and safety , and have employed marketing manager Rachel Bell to help manage the growing client list.

"So what we've done is brought Rachel into the team to manage that while we step back and take some retirement", Mr Anderson said.

He said it was good to see that more and more companies were taking health and safety seriously, as opposed to the "flying by the seat of their pants" approach of the past.

"We got in the game in 1993 and up until the changes to the Health and Safety Act in April 2015, health and safety was a little bit like Siberia - everyone knows where it is but no one wants to go there."

The difficulty now for many firms was finding the resources to implement health and safety plans.

There was also a lot of fear and misunderstanding amongst companies when it came to health and safety.

Mr Anderson added that the company was also the only one in New Zealand that worked with ACC's safety auditor, who also utilised the company's software programme.

"That's something we're quite proud of."

Mrs Anderson said people were increasingly realising that health and safety was for their own benefit.

"What a lot of people have to come to grips with is it is not a liability, it's an asset. The cost to a business of having an accident are crippling. It's all the down-time, lost hours, damaged assets, if you start adding up it can be thousands of dollars."