Energy and safety in the spotlight

by Paul Lacey, head of sustainability

We continue to develop and embed sustainability within the business. Considerable effort was channelled during the year into behavioural safety and energy and carbon reduction. These are the two areas where focus is needed if we are to hit our challenging 2020 targets.

On the energy side, gaining the global management standard ISO 50001 was a huge achievement and reflected the commitment of our site-based staff to energy reduction. Further investment in plant, operational excellence and renewable energy will be critical to delivering the carbon reductions we require and we remain fully committed to the task.

We have created a carbon and energy steering group to oversee our strategy, chaired by an executive director and with representatives from all business lines and departments. At a site level we continue to train our employees and encourage our sustainability representatives to champion the introduction and development of energy reduction initiatives.

Turning to safety, 2015 was not a good year with a fatality aboard the marine dredger Arco Avon and an increased number of lost time injuries, over half of which involved drivers. However, 181 of our sites have been lost time injury-free for 10 years or more and 95 per cent had no incidents last year.

Communicating the lessons learned from accidents and continuing to embed behavioural safety are critical to improving performance. Last May we stopped work for two hours for a co-ordinated health and safety stand-down, involving employees, drivers and contractors. We also organised another successful health and safety week which covered driver engagement and risk assessment. It also re-emphasised the important link between work and home and was supported by a website for employees and their families.

These initiatives and the work we are doing to improve employee engagement and housekeeping continue to improve the safety culture, but there is still work to be done.

Finally, and to support our aim to be a leading sustainable business, we have set up additional steering groups led by business line managing directors to create improvement plans in the specific areas defined in our strategy and covered in this report.

Looking ahead we still have a lot of work to do to achieve our 2020 targets, but we will continue to promote the principles of working sustainably to our workforce and to meet the demands of our customers and their clients to deliver a sustainable built environment.