Safety budgeting cost for construction project

Abstract

The safety performance of a building site varies with the amount of safety investment in the project. In general, the higher the safety investment, the better the safety performance will be and vice versa. The weakness of the current bidding system is that a contractor who bids for a project emphasize on estimating for major items only to lowers their price. This system will have an impact on the safety budgeting. The aim of this study is to evaluate safety budgeting cost regarding safety and health features for building construction project. The objectives of this study are to identify the term and condition in contract document which defines or specified about safety and health requirement and to describe the work breakdown structure as well as to quantify the cost of safety and health feature's element of work in a work breakdown structure. A total of seven contract document has been collected from several companies and a case study was conducted on a multi storey building in order to evaluate safety budgeting features. The findings show that most of the contract documents put little emphasis on safety budgeting. The Work Breakdown Structure for this project consist of basement and superstructure works, swimming pool and pool deck, external works and nominated sub-contractor works. Through the case study, the safety budgeting cost for the project was found to be RM905,373.00, amounting to 1.67% of the contract value RM54,000,000.00. In order to ensure that occupational safety and health is properly implemented, safety needs must at first be included in the budget. This can be achieved by making it as a permanent feature in the contract document bills of quantity.