It wasn’t bad luck, it was bad choices.
Here is my invitation to everyone in our industry:
Take the three commitments, and talk about them every week.
Treat every near-miss as a gift, and wear the badge. It’ll save lives.
Confessions of an MD – an interview with John Trayfoot.
“It wasn’t bad luck, it was bad choices.”
23 years ago, in 2003, John Trayfoot, climbed onto a roof without a harness or a helmet and fell through a skylight. Now Managing Director of M R Scaffolding Services, he explains why the company celebrates when near-miss reporting goes up, and why he wants the rest of the industry to steal the three lines his culture is built on.
‘’In 2003 I was a student in Brighton University, working part-time as a scaffold inspector. One morning I went to look at a viaduct scaffold on Beaconsfield Road – a job I had done many times before. I knew the structure, I knew the route up, and I knew the rules. I climbed onto the roof without a harness or a helmet anyway, to save time, and fell through a plastic skylight.
I fractured my skull. The hospital kept me in for a while, watching for a brain haemorrhage. I have no memory of the fall – nothing between climbing up and waking in that bed. I was lucky and recovered fully, but I left the hospital understanding something that has shaped everything since.
It wasn’t bad luck, it was bad choices. And when I thought about how many people I knew making the same choices to save a few minutes on site, I realised everyone was making them.
Almost every serious incident in our industry starts the same way. The HSE’s latest figures put falls from height at 31 worker deaths in 2025/26 – that’s around a quarter of all workplace deaths in Great Britain.
Behind most of those numbers isn’t a freak event. There is a choice that nobody challenged.
Procedures don’t interrupt bad choices, people do.
Every company in this industry has method statements, inspections and inductions, and none of them were absent the day I fell, but paperwork doesn’t tap you on the shoulder to prevent you from making mistakes. The only thing that interrupts a bad choice in real time is another human being who feels able to say something, and whether they feel able is a matter of culture, not compliance.
Psychological safety is a cultural advantage, and we have a programme built to make people feel safe to speak up when they need to, and we call it Safer Together. It rests on three commitments that every operative carries:
– Look after yourself.
– Look after each other.
– Never stay silent when something isn’t right.
Those three lines are now an integral part of our weekly meetings where our teams talk through hazards, share near-miss experiences, and surface the concerns that keeps everyone safer.
Most of this industry still chases zero on every chart, but a near-miss report is not a failure; it’s evidence that somebody trusted the culture enough to be honest, and that a risk was caught. When reporting rises, trust is rising. When trust rises, incidents decline.
Soon, every M R operative wears a Safer Together badge on their hi-vis. The badge itself is a small thing, but what it stands for isn’t – it’s a visible licence that says anyone here can call it and will be thanked for it.
I believe the culture we have created also plays a role in the awards we have been nominated for and earned: three City of London Considerate Contractor Scheme Gold Awards, in 2017, 2020 and 2026, and shortlisted for CN and NASC awards. The panel scores six criteria – care, cleanliness, consideration, co-operation, communication and climate – and every one of them is a behaviour before it is a policy. You can only build people who make good choices when nobody is watching.
Steal these three lines
So here is my invitation to everyone in our industry reading this, including the ones we compete against for work.
Take the three commitments. They’re not trademarked. Keep them in a weekly conversation where a near-miss is treated as a gift and watch what happens. You can have the badge as well. It will serve us all and save lives.
I don’t mind if nobody remembers where the lines came from. Twenty-three years ago, I fell through a roof because nobody, including me, said the obvious thing out loud. If three sentences can put that voice on someone else’s site, they belong to the industry, not to us.
I’ve learnt the hard way that safety isn’t luck, it’s a choice. And it’s one I make every single day, because I know exactly what happens when you don’t.
Read the story here, in ScaffMag.