The PASMA Code of Practice and Training Course

As the market grew and more people started to use mobile towers, and often in an inappropriate way, the number of accidents due to misuse increased. The problem was exacerbated by an aggressive campaign run by a large part of the traditional steel scaffolding companies who ran a concerted campaign to argue that only scaffolders should erect towers.  PASMA wanted to show that, with correct guidance aluminium towers were a very safe option. This highlighted the need for guidance for users. PASMA offered the perfect conduit for this and first the Code of Practice and then the Training course came into being. Ken Richardson of Aliscaff was a leading advocate of both of these and supplied much of the original material. The COP was an instant success and was frequently being revised and amended but the training course was a bit of a sleeper. The writer remembers a review meeting after a year or so where the most active training member that year announced triumphantly that they had trained 86 delegates.

With the membership of PASMA growing and the emphasis on safety and training in the market increasing, the workload for the voluntary officers of PASMA became too great and the decision was made to employ a part time secretary. In the first instance this role was undertaken by Eric Abbey who had recently retired as production director of the S&C factory at Maldon. Eric fulfilled this role for some years until the level of work became too great and a decision was made to employ a full-time officer and an external secretarial service based in Leeds who could offer full time phone monitoring and more capacity for storage and despatch. Driven by the success of the user training course the PASMA organisation has grown and grown enabling PASMA to build an organisation that truly represents the interests of all users.

The PASMA tower users training course has gone from small beginnings to becoming the international benchmark for tower user training. From just over a hundred delegates a year trained when the first course was introduced in the 1970, s it has evolved into the training scheme that trains tens of thousands of delegates a year both in the UK and overseas.