Health & safety

Health & safety measures are paramount: often the difficulty of dealing with these is planned by the protesters as a deterrent to enforcement.

Environmental demonstrators are likely to set up encampments, dig tunnels, set up tree-top and roof occupations. There can be very extensive lock-ons, which are challenging to tackle, particularly from a health and safety perspective. Once they get wind of an eviction, they may also bring in reinforcements to escalate the protest.

Policies

We take the Health and Safety aspect of what we do very seriously. We have developed an extensive generic policy that has been written with wide-ranging, eminently practical policy, derived from many years’ experience.

In addition to the general policy, we undertake dynamic risk assessment when enforcing on an eviction encampment, where our experience and knowledge really comes into play.

Each site individually risk assessed

Dealing with very serious protestors and activists is similar in principle to playing a game of chess: they make a move - we make a move, they make another move. To date it has ended up in a case of checkmate to the National Eviction Team.

We do not act precipitately. We proceed with caution, assess the risks and address them.

Health & Safety Executive

In the early years, we worked closely with the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). They will be the first to admit that they were also on a learning curve in agreeing our methodology statements and risk assessments.

Over many trusted years of safely removing protestors, the National Eviction Team has the confidence of the HSE to undertake this very high risk work.