Rodney Cox, Director, Exhibitions and Trade Fairs
It’s been an interesting process in my 15 years in the event business, seeing just how much safety and occupational health and safety and work practices have changed. We make a bit of a joke in our industry that if you went back to the early 90s the hero was the person who worked 24 hours a day and took risks to get the job done, and that person is now the person you do not want on a site at all. There was some resistance on the industry’s part that they couldn’t get their work done in time if they had to comply with safety requirements, so one of the challenges was to ensure that safety was not something that was added on at the end but safety was something that was incorporated, occupational health and safety was something that was incorporated into the process of running the event.