Health and safety

Our top priority is keeping our employees and the people who work with us safe and healthy.

Managing health and safety

It is our objective to be the recognised leader in the delivery of health and safety, and our Board is committed to achieving this. Richard Howson, our Chief Operating Officer, holds Group-wide responsibility for health and safety. The Board receives monthly reports on our performance and health and safety is the first agenda item at each meeting.

We provide health and safety training for our people and maintain high levels of awareness through ongoing programmes. Our businesses have formal health and safety management systems, with the UK and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions officially certified to the BS OHSAS 18001 standard.

Our management systems include a robust Group-wide policy as well as a clear communication and training framework. All contracts are assessed for health and safety risks at each stage: design, delivery and use.

In our annual employee survey, the Great Debate, 87% of our UK people agreed with the statement “Health and safety is a top priority where I work”. We are very pleased that this score improves every year and remains the highest response in the UK survey.

Target Zero

This is our corporate objective to eliminate all reportable accidents. We strive to achieve this with our wide range of tools, training, audits and safety action groups (SAG). In 2010, approximately over 6,200 Carillion employees were involved in at least one SAG. Ultimately, to achieve our objective, we rely on all our people being vigilant and adopting safe working practices. We Target Zero every single day and, if an accident does occur, we learn from it and Target Zero again the next day.

Behaving Safely

Our Behaving Safely campaign supports Target Zero by highlighting the behaviours required to improve safety. Key themes include following rules, speaking up, being aware and getting involved. There are additional, specific behaviours required for managers and supervisors.

It is essential for us to engage and involve our people and suppliers in helping to manage health and safety risk. We have regular planned work stoppages and safety action groups to give our people the opportunity to discuss safety issues and improvements.

In 2010, our UK Construction business received over 29,000 pieces of employee feedback on safety issues including better ways of managing access to restricted areas, providing appropriate foot protection and keeping eye protection clean. In Canada, we implemented our mandatory hand and eye protection policy at all our sites, and hand and eye injuries fell by 50% and 44% respectively, compared to 2009.

To engage our people further and promote best practice, we have internal health and safety awards in our business units. For example, Carillion Plant Services gave a best practice award to a team which innovatively used flags to make small vehicles visible in a large quarry. They increased visibility further by extending the flags to over four metres and fitting them with lights. This further reduced the risk of our vehicles being struck by larger quarry vehicles.

We operate an internal telephone reporting system for all UK health, safety and environmental accidents and incidents. They are recorded centrally to ensure a prompt follow-up. We are able to monitor these and issue daily reports, sending details of serious incidents to line managers via SMS text. We also send reports to the Board on a monthly basis.

Carillion Training Services (CTS) commissioned an independent expert review of its training provision. The feedback was very encouraging, especially on health and safety.

“I have never spoken to any apprentices more knowledgeable on health and safety than those in CTS. Both new starters and those who had been on the programme for over a year could answer my questions. This demonstrates that CTS not only engages with apprentices early but also maintains the messaging so that it stays strong.”

John Watson,
External Inspection Adviser, Construction Skills

Don’t Walk By

In 2010, we refreshed one of our key safety programmes, Don’t Walk By (DWB), which encourages people to look for and report hazards that can be resolved before an accident occurs. We have successfully embedded DWB throughout all operations. In 2010, we received an average of over six DWB reports per employee and sub-contractor. In 2011, we are targeting a rate of one DWB report per person, per month.

The increase in DWB reporting corresponds to a decrease in the Group’s accident frequency rate (AFR) of 23% from 0.13 RIDDOR* reportable accidents per 100,000 hours worked in 2009 to 0.1 in 2010 with three out of four of our projects achieving zero reportable accidents in the year.

In the Middle East, we achieved a major milestone of working over 20 million man hours without a reportable accident at our Al Muneera project.

^*Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations.

Increased DWB reporting reduces AFR

The Carillion Highways Maintenance contract Area 08 had an accident frequency rate of zero throughout most of 2010, and reached a major milestone of over one million man hours without a reportable accident.

All our people at Area 08 remained proactive and committed towards DWB throughout 2010. We based our approach on embedding a culture of reporting hazards. The graph above shows the correlation between an increase in DWB reporting and a decrease in accidents and incidents at Area 8.

AC²E: awareness, competence, compliance and excellence

This is our framework for evaluating our safety systems and behaviours against a standard of excellence. Below are the tools we use to assess and drive improvement.

Awareness: policy, communication, responsibility and hazard identification
Competence: training, behaviour and risk management
Compliance: management systems, incident investigation, performance measurement and supply chain management
Excellence: innovative practices, influencing stakeholders, health and wellbeing.

The AC²E framework allows our business units to evaluate their health and safety systems and set themselves targets for improvement. Across the Group, we achieved an AC²E score of 73% in 2010, against a target of 70%, compared to 56% in 2009.

Take Five For Safety!

In 2010, the health sector of Carillion Facilities Management implemented a weekly safety initiative entitled Take Five For Safety (T5FS). This is a verbal briefing given by supervisors about a recent accident or safety event. It highlights lessons to be learnt, and key T5FS messages are posted on notice boards after the briefing. The initiative has contributed to a 60% reduction in the number of accidents in this part of the business.

Unfortunately, as a result of an accident in 2008 when an employee was injured by a reversing vehicle on a civil engineering project in Lancashire, we had one prosecution by the Health and Safety Executive in 2010. It resulted in a fine of £185,000 plus £10,000 costs.

We deeply regret that, despite the very encouraging reduction in accidents in 2010, five fatal accidents occurred at Carillion work sites during 2010 in which six people tragically lost their lives. An employee of a sub-contractor was fatally injured while clearing vegetation on a Carillion project at Barrow-in-Furness. In Alberta, Canada, a Carillion Canada employee died while carrying out highway maintenance work, after being struck by a vehicle driven by a member of the public. In Egypt, an employee of our Joint Venture partner Orascom, was fatally injured by a fall, after being struck by a prop being used for construction work at the Cairo Festival City project. In Abu Dhabi, two Al Futtaim Carillion employees died when they were struck by a pre-cast concrete floor section, which had been in place for several days before suddenly collapsing without warning. In Oman, a Carillion Alawi employee was fatally injured when he fell and was run over by a water tanker.

Every accident is a personal tragedy and our thoughts are with the families and friends of those who died.