Health and safety - UK

What sets us apart from our peers in the management of health and safety is the extent and depth of our active monitoring programme. The traditional approach of reactive monitoring (recording accidents and incidents) only measures where things have gone wrong. The active monitoring programme we employ provides information on the effectiveness of our systems and hence allows us to identify potential weaknesses before they result in accidents.

In the UK, our safety specialists undertake regular monitoring of our project sites. Our two principal forms of monitoring are Management Audits and Site Inspections.

Management Audits measure how well our project teams have planned the management of health and safety.

Site Inspections measure how well our project teams are implementing health and safety management (the inspections are based on observations of what is physically happening on site).

We have developed an overall measure of health and safety, the ‘Safety Index’. The Safety Index (a score from 1 to 5) is derived from a combination of the scores for Management Audit performance and Site Inspection according to a matrix which is updated annually. The matrix differentiates between our Homebuilding business and our Construction business, the latter often dealing with more complex health and safety management considerations.

In the UK we also provide an occupational health service which supports the business in terms of health screening, health surveillance for those in higher risk occupations, and referral to specialists of any employees with occupational-related illness.