PAR2007 - IPAF

PRESIDENT IN PROFILE
View from
the top
Andrew Reid, the new president of IPAF, is
one of the pioneers of powered access. Phil
Bishop talks to him about the policy to get
tough with rogues and corner-cutters in
the industry.
tion to detail was lost, accidents began
to happen and mast climbers fell out of
favour.
Specialist offering
Reid returned to the industry in 1996,
establishing Mastclimbers as a specialist
rental company. “When I started
Mastclimbers it was a case of buying
back kit that had been lying around in
yards with nettles growing over it,“ he
says. But with a good scrub and a lick of
paint, it was as good as new.
The first purchase was the fleet of
Foulis, which had 70 machines. Three
days later, while dismantling a mast
climber that Foulis had erected in
Glasgow, the platform collapsed. “That
was my relaunch back into the mastclimbing
industry,” says Reid. “During
the investigations into that accident,
I was informed by the HSE that they
were within a whisker of banning them.
There had been a couple of fatalities the
year before with the EPL fleet. The use
of the product was beginning to be an
embarrassment because of the number
of accidents,” he recalls.
When Andrew Reid looks around the
construction industry today he is “gobsmacked”,
he says, “at the number of
powered access products and the level
of acceptance they now have”. This
is because he can recall the days, 25
years ago, when he would drive around
construction sites with a boom lift or
scissor lift on the back of a trailer trying
to persuade people to try it. “I look back
at how we had to knock down doors to
get people to even look at the thing,” he
says. “It was true pioneering stuff. We
were literally forcing people to try it.”
Over the past 30 years, Reid – now
60 – has played a key role in getting
firstly boom and scissor lifts, and then
mast climbing work platforms, accepted
in the UK. And he has worked in manufacturing,
distribution and the rental
side as well.
Career move
Reid’s first contact with the powered
access industry was in 1975. He was
working in marketing for Coles Cranes
at the time. John L Grove had been
squeezed out of the Grove Crane company
that he had founded and so, having
signed a non-compete agreement,
established JLG Industries to produce
powered access platforms.
JLG approached Coles with a proposal
for the latter to produce its platforms in
the UK. The talks came to nothing, but
they paved the way for a team from
Coles to move to JLG in 1979 to set up a
new factory in Cumbernauld. So it was
that Reid returned to his native Scotland
after eight years in London with Coles
as sales and marketing director of JLG.
In 1985 he left JLG to set up his own
business, Anca Work Platforms, importing
mast-climbing equipment made
in Sweden by Malmqvist Svenska, in
which he was also a major shareholder
until its sale to HEK of Holland six years
later.
“Mast climbers were still an embryonic
product”, he says, but Reid was
sufficiently successful in persuading the
industry that they represented the next
revolution in access that he made sales
to the major rental companies of the
day, such as PTP, Scott Greenham and
Hewden Stewart. “PTP built up a fleet of
a couple of hundred units,” he recalls.
In fact, Anca Work Platforms was
sold to PTP in 1986, and eventually
became the core of BET and Rentokil’s
mast-climbing subsidiary.
However, the image of mast climbers
came to take a battering. They are
a specialist piece of kit, but as rental
companies changed hands, they began
to be treated as commodity items. “The
product lost its specialised support from
people who knew how to handle them,
and they got parcelled in with scissors
and booms,” Reid explains. As atten-
Raising standards
This experience informs Reid’s close
involvement with IPAF and the role
he has played in the development of
standards. He has chaired IPAF’s mastclimbers
committee since its formation
20 years ago, when it got together with
the HSE to define the regime for this
new product. “We have gone from a lack
of definition, to a European harmonised
design standard adopted by ISO and a
British standard for safe use. That’s been
achieved through IPAF,” he says.
The standards agenda was given a
major push after the Glasgow accident.
“That accident led me to delve very
deeply into all manner of legislation,” he
says. Within five years, all the European
and British standards had been re-written.
“And – dangerous as it is to say – I
am delighted that there hasn’t been an
MCWP accident in the UK in the past
three years,” he adds.
Tough regulation
With first-hand experience of how
accidents, and the headlines that they
generate, can impact on the perception
of a product and the reputation of an
industry, Reid is a firm believer in tough
regulation to promote best practice and
safety.
“What happens in every industry,
companies, people, individuals are basically
out to make a buck. If they can cut
a corner this way, cut a corner that way
“There is nothing more sickening than seeing certain
organisations disregard standards and put the whole
industry at risk.”
Andrew Reid
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IPAF POWERED ACCESS REVIEW 2007