Coloured Hard Hats Introduced To Improve Site Safety

The construction industry has introduced a new regime of coloured hard hats. Highway maintenance and construction site workers will now have to follow this procedure to make sites safer.

What do different Coloured hard hats mean?

The new hard hat colour codes are as follows:

• Black – Supervisors
• Orange – Slinger/Signaller
• White – Site Manager / Competent Operative / Vehicle Marshall (also wears a different coloured hi-vis vest)
• Blue – Inexperienced Person / Visitor / Apprentice / Architect /

Anyone else who doesn’t fall into the above categories.

• Green First Aid + Sticker: First Aider
• Red Fire Marshal + Sticker: Fire Marshal

All the above colours are in line BS EN 397 standard.

Coloured Hard Hats for High Way Workers

Operatives will now wear white hats, as well as managers of the client. The black will go to Site Supervisors and green and yellow hats will be completely removed from highway maintenance. Slinger / Signallers will wear orange and site visitors or inexperienced persons will wear blue.
The changes have been introduced as an effort to recognise best practice and improve standards. Costs would also be reduced because firms would no longer have to buy a range of coloured hard hats for different jobs.

In some situations, a site might be too small for the process to work effectively. In this instance, the workers will all wear the white helmet.

Construction Sites

Coloured hard hats on all construction sites will also be introduced; the helmets will help workers to identify others by their level of qualification. Similarly to highway workers Site Supervisors will wear black and Slinger / Signallers will wear orange.

Site Managers and competent operatives will wear white hard hats. Vehicle Marshals will also have this attire but will differentiate themselves by wearing high visibility vests. The industry will now remove the traditional yellow construction hat from the list. Additionally appointed Fire Marshals and First Aiders will have stickers on their helmets to clearly show their skill set.

If you think members of your workforce need additional training take a look at the Health and Safety courses 3B Training can offer.

Types of PPE

For more on-site safety, take a look at our blog on the different types of personal protective equipment available and their limitations.

Read more here.