During 2000, Carillion projects and local offices won eight Royal Society for Prevention of Accidents (ROSPA) safety awards, of which one was a merit, one a gold medal, six were gold awards.

Crown House Engineering won the prestigious ROSPA President’s Award for an outstanding record of 10 consecutive years of occupational health and safety improvement. With more than 2000 employees working on dozens of sites throughout the UK, this represents a substantial achievement by Crown House Engineering. The award was won in early 2000 and was also reported in Carillion’s previous report ‘We are Making Choices’.

Carillion received two commendations from the Contract Journal and Construction Confederation sponsored Working Well Together Campaign Silver Helmet Award Scheme for safety.

Overseas, Carillion’s safety performance was recognised on a £14 million contract to build accommodation for oil workers in the remote location of Fahud and Nimir in the Sultanate of Oman. The client, Petroleum Development Oman, presented a plaque to commemorate the achievement of two million man-hours without a lost time accident.

 Schal’s work at BP Sunbury’s Business & Technology park has been applauded by BP for having ‘no days away from work cases’ over a period of 1 million hours worked’.

Carillion Building launched its own Safety Award scheme, ‘Don’t Walk By’ which encourages direct intervention to identify hazards before they cause injury. The first Carillion Building site team to receive a certificate of commendation was the Darent Valley Hospital project at Dartford, where 600,000 man-hours have been worked without a single reportable accident.

Despite our best efforts, accidents unfortunately occurred in 2000.

• In July 2000 Centrac were prosecuted for a vehicle overloading offence near Watford and fined £800 plus costs.

• In August 2000, Carillion Building was fined £15,000 plus costs when an excavator fell from a tower crane at the Mailbox, Birmingham in December 1999.

• In August 2000, Crown House was fined £4,000 plus costs after an electrician was burned during a maintenance operation in Swansea.

• In October 2000, Carillion Building was fined £18,000 plus costs after holrib decking failed causing injury to a contractor in Manchester in August 1999.

During 2000 Carillion targeted key identified safety issues. The provision of information and safety campaigns cost £200,000. In 2001 campaigns will focus upon:

• Trips at ground level
• Being struck by moving objects
• Handling and lifting
• Falls from height

In addition to internal training courses, listed above, Business Units ran their own training sessions, which have reflected their specific operational requirements.

The result of training undertaken in 2000 is that:

Carillion has a duty to ensure a safe working environment for all who undertake activities on our projects. To ensure that we are managing our sites safely a record of accidents are made, to enable us to spot trends and manage our projects safely. We are particularly pleased that some Business Groups have a culture of reporting accidents. We will be encouraging increased reporting in 2001 when we will introduce an electronic system of reporting that should capture all incidents on one system and facilitate more sophisticated data analysis. Carillion recognises that epidemiological study of accident information better enables bench marking on a like for like basis and the accurate targeting of resources on key issues.

¹ The incident rate shows the number of accidents per 100,000 full-time equivalent employees.

² Given the varying hours worked across our activities Carillion also uses "frequency rate" statistics. This is the number of accidents per 100,000 hours worked. 

^# The employee numbers quoted above represent "full time employee equivalent" numbers, based on 2,400 hours per employee per year. 

These three formulae are recognised by the International Labour Office, Encyclopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety, 3^rd edition, 34, ILO, Geneva.