Health & safety
Health and safety
HomeServe continues to strive to manage health and safety successfully and where possible, deliver improvements in its performance. HomeServe's strategy continues to be to ensure compliance with legal standards as a minimum, but where practicable, adopt good industry practice and share that practice across the businesses.
Risks
HomeServe has a variety of health and safety risks to manage. Transport and road risk, slips, trips and falls, manual handling and lone working represent some of the most common risks arising from our activities. HomeServe is committed to managing these risks in a balanced and proportionate way. All the businesses are required to have a suitable health and safety policy in place with a supporting management system underpinned by a robust risk assessment process, reflecting the risks within each particular business. Our services are often delivered via partnerships with contractors, franchisees and other suppliers. We work with these partners to ensure that our health and safety expectations are understood and met, and that the work they undertake on our behalf is managed as safely as is reasonably practicable.
Performance
During the year, HomeServe has proactively worked on improving the arrangements in place to manage health and safety. We have reviewed and standardised our UK policy ensuring that arrangements are consistent across all sites. In the UK we have also continued to deliver training to our network management employees through the use of proprietary training packages - 'IOSH Managing Safely' and 'IOSH Working Safely'. In 2011 we will be rolling out an internally developed computer based training package for our office based managers and other employees which will focus on providing an awareness of health and safety responsibilities and an overview of our health and safety policy arrangements.
A key element for the effective management of health and safety within the organisation is the development of a culture in which line management actively demonstrates ownership of health and safety issues. HomeServe expects each of its businesses to ensure compliance with relevant health and safety legislation regardless of the country in which it is operating. The recently appointed global Head of Health & Safety works with the businesses to ensure that they meet local legal requirements as a minimum whilst at the same time meeting our own internal health and safety standards. Martin Bennett is the Main Board Director responsible for reporting on health and safety, but the Board as a whole remains responsible for health and safety issues across the Group.
During the year the network management business in the UK has been awarded the RoSPA Gold award for its health and safety performance. This is the second year the network management business has entered the awards, building on last year's Silver award. HomeServe at Home entered the award for the first time in the year, obtaining a Silver award. The scheme looks not only at accident records, but also entrants' overarching health and safety management systems, including important practices such as strong leadership and workforce involvement.
HomeServe has had limited contact with national health and safety enforcing authorities during the reporting period, with no prosecutions or other enforcement action being taken against the Company for breaches of health and safety regulations.
Accidents/incidents
In the UK HomeServe had no fatalities, no defined major injuries and no dangerous occurrences during the year. However it did have a total of 21 defined over '3 day' RIDDOR reportable lost time accidents, which is an increase of 7 over the previous year.
In total during this period there were 135 accidents recorded compared to 122 in 2009/10. Overall a total of 259 working days were lost as a result of work related accidents, an increase of 7.9% over the 2009/10 figure of 240.
As in previous years, the main causes of the accidents or incidents were in respect of slips, trips and falls, cuts and bruises, manual handling or muscular strains. The overall lost time accident frequency rate per million hours worked is calculated as 12.1 compared with 8.56 for the previous year. The accident incident rate for lost time reportable incidents per 1,000 employees was 7.15, compared with a rate of 4.85 the previous year and our severity rate (lost time due to accidents per 1,000 hours worked) was 0.15 which was the same as the previous year.
Despite our continued efforts to improve our Health and Safety performance, the frequency of incidents is up on the previous year. Although process improvements may have led to better reporting of accidents there is clearly a need to ensure that successful health and safety management remains a continued priority for HomeServe, with particular emphasis being placed on the reduction in the overall accident rate.
Plans for 2011/12
We will continue to review our health and safety arrangements, with particular focus on our international businesses, ensuring that the arrangements we have in place are suitable and sufficient to safely manage the activities being performed.
Work is planned to improve the range of data and other information used for health and safety performance measurement so that a clearer overview, in a simple standard format, is available. This will provide greater visibility of the overall Health and Safety performance, enabling Directors to see where risks are well managed and where more work is needed.
We continue to focus on the three key risks identified as being significant and affecting most of HomeServe's activities: driving and road risks, contractor and franchisee management and work station ergonomics.
