During 2021 the Safety and Compliance department underwent a full review and restructure to reposition it from being a strictly compliance-based role to providing strategic leadership of the Group Risk and Safety function. A vision of good risk management was created, and a strategy developed to build a roadmap to excellence which was signed off by our Executive Team at our annual strategy day.

A Target Operating Model was developed to reflect our strategy and develop clear objectives, underpinned by specific proactive KPIs agrees and established at Operating Divisional level.

Strategy

The safety and wellbeing of our people remains a core value in our business. To implement these values, we have developed a vision of safety excellence, underpinned by a mission to move our risk and safety culture forward from its solid base of compliance towards a more commitment focussed future. Compliance alone is not enough – it’s just achieving someone else’s minimum standard.

A positive safety culture is an ongoing outcome of a successful people orientated business and we need to create safety, to enhance wellbeing and make work a positive experience. Discussing the number of people we hurt on a monthly basis is not enough.

To achieve this, we have worked across the operating divisions to agree a suite of proactive safety KPIs to deliver against our four key themes of Culture, Leadership, Risk Process and Compliance.

Designed to enhance our operational risk literary and transparency and create the leadership and behaviours necessary for our safety culture to mature, the KPIs have been formally agreed at board level, and will be a feature of all board reports going forwards.

Governance

Each operating company has its own health and safety function who implement policy and procedures at an operational level and carry out front line audit functions.

The Group risk and safety team provide overall strategic direction and support and carry out a second line of defence audit function of operational systems and processes. Further assurance is provided by internal audit, who will this year also audit, at their own request, the Group Risk and Safety team.

Across the business there is a clear escalation of health, safety and welfare matters from employee safety committees to management safety review boards and finally divisional, Group and PLC board meetings, where risk and safety is always the first agenda item.

There are monthly meetings of the group’s risk and safety professionals and a formal ESG monthly update.

The Group Head of Risk and Safety is present at all board meetings, provides a consistent overview of operational risk issues, and submits a formal monthly report to the Group and PLC boards.

Wellbeing

Our brand-new Workplace Adjustments Guide for Managers provides support on a whole host of issues their employees may face from managing neurodiverse employees, right through to long-term health conditions such as cancer.