Lead Consultation

The stained glass community only has until 24 May to respond to a consultation on safe working levels of lead.

We need your help to safeguard the future of stained glass and we are asking you to fill in the online questionnaire from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). We need as many responses as possible so that HSE treat us fairly and are aware of any unintended consequences of the proposals.

The HSE has launched a consultation to review the current laws around working safely with lead. We welcome the review as health and safety is important to us all. You can submit a response here.

However, the current proposals would reduce permitted blood lead levels by up to 80% within less than four years. We believe that in many cases this will be unachievable, even with best-practice health and safety measures in place. For women of reproductive capacity (ie under 49, regardless of whether they plan to or are capable of having children), the proposed limits are lower than some background levels we believe are found in the general population, although there is very little data on background levels. Our most experienced workers (male and female) will also be hit hard because it takes many years to reduce the detectable lead levels in blood.

At the risk of sounding alarmist, this could affect all of us. At a time when traditional stained glass window making for historic buildings is on the Red List of Endangered Crafts due to lack of education and commission opportunities, ageing practitioners and rising costs of materials, the proposals could be catastrophic. Studios could be forced to close because they won’t have skilled workers. This means that windows in our historic buildings will not receive the attention they require.

Sarah Knighton (who runs our Conservation Working Group) has been spearheading our response. Under the new proposals, Sarah would be suspended from working with lead. Like all of us, Sarah is passionate about stained glass.

Sarah has made a video that goes through how to fill in the consultation form. There are  84 pages of information and questions. The video is designed to be paused as you fill in the form, so allow couple of hours. You can come back to it. We thank Sarah for explaining the issues and making a difficult task much easier. You can watch the video here.

We have been advised that having a large number of responses to the HSE consultation questionnaire from a wide range of people will help our case. You can fill it in as a ‘member of the public’ even if you don’t work with lead. Please encourage others who care about stained glass to respond.

We will be holding a free zoom meeting on Wednesday 6 May at 7pm. You can join here. The meeting will focus on filling in the forms and attempting to answer your questions.

In addition we encourage you to write to your MP to highlight the review. You can download a suggested letter that you can adapt here: MP letter. If you would like a Word version please email secretary@bsmgp.org.uk

The new measures will apply to everyone who works with lead, not just stained glass artists and conservators. Please add your voice so that our future is sustainable.