When health and safety meant a pair of boots

If you started your engineering career any time before the 1980s, you’ll know exactly what we mean when we say health and safety has come a long way.

Our founder and Chair, David Simm, my dad, started his apprenticeship in 1968 at the age of 15. He was working with high-voltage equipment on the shop-floor, expected to put his hands inside live enclosures, and getting electric shocks on a daily basis. That was the norm. Nobody questioned it. The experienced engineers around him, some of whom had fought in wars, had one piece of advice for the young apprentice: “Just get on with it, kid.”

Health and safety back then? A pair of boots.

Dad tells these stories with a smile on his face. They’re part of who he is, and they’re woven into the DNA of Scantime. But make no mistake: behind the humour, there’s a deadly serious point. The reason dad is so strict about safety today is because he lived through an era when nobody was.

The first big shock that nearly killed him

Every engineer who’s worked with live equipment knows the small shocks. The ones that make you jump, swear, and carry on. Dad had those every single day as an apprentice. But when the small shocks stopped coming, that’s when the old hands started to worry. It meant the gods were lining you up for a big shock.

That happened to my dad when he was just 17 years old.

He was sent to fix a high-voltage (1200 Votls) welding machine on the shop-floor. On his own. He opened the enclosure, put his probes onto the terminals, reached around the cabinet door with his left hand, and pushed his index finger through the metal hole to switch the power on… At this point, dad was the Earth connection.

The current locked him in place. His finger was on fire from the arcing. The shock was racing across his body, and he couldn’t let go. If the current had continued for much longer, it would have stopped his heart. Nobody on the shop-floor was facing his direction. Nobody was coming to help.

He came off the equipment eventually. He doesn’t know how. Five seconds later, the adrenaline kicked in, and every nerve in his body went wild.

His boss’s response? He told dad he’d used the wrong technique, along with a few jokes.

Dad was working with 1200 Volts. Instead of holding the probles onto the terminals where the slightest bit of moisture on the probes would allow current to flow up and through my dad, he should have clipped the probes onto the terminals. Stood back and then pressed the button. But nobody had taught him that. There was no formal health and safety training. You learnt the hard way, or you didn’t learn at all.

“In the 1960s and ’70s, it was a case of just get on with it. You learnt the hard way. Health and safety back in the 1960s was a pair of boots.”

David Simm, Chair, Scantime

The second big shock: 750,000 Watts

If the first incident wasn’t enough, the second one upped the stakes considerably.

Dad was working with his supervisor on a control panel fitted with 3 x 600 Amp breakers that had tripped and killed power to the plant. They each began resetting the breakers using two hands to move them. Bang! Bang! was the sound each breaker made as it slammed back into position. But as the last breaker went in, there was a colossal explosion. A massive bang, a blinding flash of light, and then everything went pitch black.

The panel in front of dad was blown clean off and sailed over his head, and smashed into the wall behind him. There was an eery quietness to the room. Dad eventually got to his feet to try and find his supervisor, who was now 10 foot from his starting position. Dad asked if he was okay. Lifted his supervisor to his feet and they both began the long walk down the corridor towards the canteen to recover. It was at this point they both noticed the whole factory was shutdown. The distribution panels, which powered the factory, were caged off for safety. Dad looked in at them, and the main incomer, which was 1,800 Amps, had blown as well. The blast had not only taken out the factory but had also taken out the substation which knocked the entire industrial estate out. It was big.

The aftermath? Once the engineer from the power company arrived and cleaned everything up, he handed dad the keys, and left him to put the power back on. By himself. It took him 30 minutes to build up the courage to start putting the breakers back in.

Dad survived both incidents. He’s still here, and still making sure that every engineer who comes through Scantime’s doors understands exactly what’s at stake when you work with electrical systems and PLCs.

The act that changed everything

The year dad’s big shock happened, the UK had no unified workplace safety legislation. Engineers were governed by a patchwork of outdated Factory Acts, and electrical safety was largely left to common sense and experience.

That changed in 1974 with the Health and Safety at Work Act. It was a landmark piece of legislation that, for the first time, placed a legal duty on employers to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their employees across all industries. According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), 257 manufacturing workers were fatally injured at work in 1974. By 2023/24, that number had fallen to 16.

The EcoOnline research team notes that between 1974 and 2007, workplace fatalities in the UK fell by 73%, and non-fatal injuries dropped by 70%.

Those numbers represent lives saved. Families kept whole. Engineers who went home at the end of their shift.

The Electricity at Work Regulations followed in 1989, replacing the old Factories Act provisions for electrical safety and making it much clearer what employers and employees needed to do to work safely with electrical systems. No more “just get on with it.”

How PLCs changed the safety landscape

When dad first encountered a PLC at Procter & Gamble in the early 1980s, programmable logic controllers were primarily production tools. They controlled processes, ran sequences, and kept the line moving. Safety was still largely handled by hardwired relay circuits, physical interlocks, and the knowledge of the engineers on shift.

Fast forward to today, and PLCs sit at the heart of modern industrial safety systems. The evolution has been dramatic.

Standard PLCs still handle the day-to-day automation on your shop-floor. But alongside them, safety PLCs have emerged as a distinct product category, purpose-built to protect people, equipment, and the environment. The key difference? When something goes wrong inside a safety PLC, the system forces outputs to a known safe state, typically de-energised, within a guaranteed response time. A standard PLC will try to keep running. A safety PLC will shut things down before someone gets hurt.

Modern safety PLCs include features like redundant processors that cross-check each other, built-in diagnostics that continuously monitor memory integrity and I/O health, watchdog timers that catch faults before they escalate, and certified function blocks for emergency stops, light curtains, and safe motion control.

This matters because equipment failures still account for around 42% of all unplanned downtime, according to Sumitomo Drive Technologies. And human error causes 23% of unplanned downtime globally, as reported by Henkel. When your shop-floor has multiple PLCs of different ages, running different lines, the potential for things to go wrong is real. Knowing how these systems work, and how they protect you, is no longer optional.

Functional safety: what engineers need to know

If you’ve heard the terms SIL ratings or Performance Levels mentioned on your shop-floor and weren’t entirely sure what they meant, you’re not alone. But as PLCs take on more safety-critical roles, understanding the basics of functional safety is becoming part of the job.

Two international standards govern how safety systems are designed for machinery. ISO 13849 uses Performance Levels (PL) and applies broadly to all technologies, including electrical, hydraulic, pneumatic, and mechanical systems. IEC 62061 uses Safety Integrity Levels (SIL 1 through SIL 4) and focuses specifically on electrical, electronic, and programmable electronic systems, which includes your PLCs.

Both standards are harmonised to the EU Machinery Directive, which requires machine manufacturers to eliminate or minimise hazards, apply protective measures, and inform users of any remaining risks. Even though the UK has left the EU, these standards remain widely recognised and followed across UK manufacturing.

At their core, SIL ratings are a way of measuring how reliably a safety system will perform its safety function when it’s needed. The higher the SIL, the lower the probability of a dangerous failure. For maintenance engineers working on PLC-controlled machinery, understanding what SIL rating your safety systems are designed to, and what that means for how you maintain and fault-find those systems, is increasingly important.

You don’t need to become a functional safety expert overnight. But you do need to know enough to work safely, to recognise what a safety PLC is doing differently from a standard PLC, and to understand why certain procedures exist on your shop-floor. That’s where training comes in.

Why staying up to date matters more than ever

The pace of change in industrial automation is relentless. PLC software versions evolve. New safety standards are introduced. Equipment manufacturers update their hardware. The shop-floor you’re working on today is different from the one you trained on 5 years ago, and it will be different again in another 5 years.

According to Make UK’s Industrial Strategy Skills Commission Report 2025, there are 55,000 long-term unfilled vacancies in UK manufacturing, costing the economy £6 billion in lost output every year. And 78% of manufacturers report productivity losses directly linked to skills gaps. One in 5 UK manufacturing workers is now over 55, and 97% of manufacturing firms are concerned about losing institutional knowledge when experienced engineers retire.

This isn’t just a recruitment problem. It’s a safety problem. When the engineer who knows how the PLCs on your shop-floor work retires, and nobody else has been trained to the same level, the risk goes up for everyone.

“Make sure you’re up-to-date with new developments in technology and equipment and the latest versions of PLC software.”

Nathan Ramsahai, Tutor, Scantime

CPD isn’t a box-ticking exercise. It’s how you keep yourself safe, keep your team safe, and keep the line running. Equipment and software versions change. If you did a PLC course 5 years ago, can you apply those same skills to the systems on your shop-floor today? If the answer is “I’m not sure,” it’s time to refresh.

Why Scantime takes safety so seriously

When you know the stories behind the company, you understand why safety isn’t just a word on a brochure at Scantime. It’s personal.

Dad has been working with PLCs since 1982. He’s been an engineer since 1968. He saw the industry before health and safety regulations existed. He got electric shocks every single day of his apprenticeship, survived a near-fatal high-voltage incident at 17, and walked away from an explosion that could have killed him. All of Scantime’s courses are designed by him, and every one of them carries that lived experience.

That’s why Scantime’s training rooms are set up the way they are: as safe spaces where you can practice on live PLCs, make mistakes, break things, and learn from them, with no time pressure and no risk of costly downtime. The only thing at risk in our classrooms is a fuse… Or the snacks running out.

“We’ll encourage you to test things out and play around. If you break things or shut things down here, it’s okay.”

Nathan Ramsahai

Our tutors are time-served controls engineers who know what it’s like to be on a shop-floor at 3am with a line down and everyone looking at you. They’ve had the shocks. They’ve felt the pressure. And they’ll make sure you leave the course with the skills and the confidence to work safely with the PLCs on your shop-floor.

“We know that the pressure’s really on. We’re here to help you handle that pressure with confidence.”

Nathan Ramsahai

All Scantime PLC training courses are City & Guilds Assured and EAL Recognised. We update our courses regularly to reflect new industry trends, new software versions, and new safety requirements. Whether you’re a first-time delegate learning to get online with a PLC, or an experienced engineer refreshing your skills, safety is at the heart of everything we teach.