Health & safety

The health and safety of our employees and others who may be affected by the Group’s operations remains an integral part of line management responsibility. Each location has designated personnel to ensure that health and safety issues are given proper attention. The communication of health and safety matters with employees remains core to ensuring that health and safety issues are integral to operations and that standards continue to improve within the Group.

The Board and the Environmental, Health & Safety Committee, a sub-committee of the Risk Oversight Committee, actively review and monitor detailed statistical performance from each site within the Group, detailing accidents and incidents to identify trends and focus on areas where improvements are required. In some instances, such a review has led to an in-depth health and safety audit at specific sites and on specific machinery, involving on-site management and external specialists. Where appropriate, action plans were developed during the year from these audits which have already resulted in improvements to accident rates and risk control performance.  Details of accidents and incidents are communicated between locations as appropriate in order that preventative action can be taken.

Risk management and health and safety issues are reviewed in a rolling programme of visits to each location by the Group Risk Manager. The Group Risk Manager works closely with the Group’s insurance risk surveyors and the Group’s insurance brokers, and their recommendations form an integral part of internal audit reviews. The insurers’ surveyors regularly visit the Group’s sites. The Group values its partnership with its insurers’ risk specialist and its insurance brokers and works in partnership with them to develop agreed steps for the continuing process of improvement of potential risk controls.

In the year to 30 November 2010, the Group had a combined rate, for the Group as a whole, of 1,553 accidents per 100,000 employees against the EU manufacturing sector rate of 3,463 per 100,000 employees.

The Group has recently adopted a zero work place accident aspiration.  Progress towards this aspiration will be achieved through:

• strong and committed leadership
• the proper attention to accident risk identification
• high levels of employee training
• embedding a strong safety culture throughout the Group
• the utilisation of plant and equipment that is properly designed, maintained and operated

The Group has set targets to achieve a significant improvement in its health and safety performance by 2013.  We aim to achieve, as a minimum, the lowest accident rate throughout all European manufacturing countries and to eliminate all major injuries in particular those associated with employee contact with operating machinery and those related to vehicle movements.  The target represents an approximate 70% improvement in the Group’s 3 day lost time accident rate by 2013 at the latest.