Health and safety

Our Board is committed to maintaining high standards of health and safety. The Management team, supported by professional safety advisers, monitors key safety performance indicators and an annual report detailing trends, performance and recommendations is presented to the Board. The business also has a properly constituted Health and Safety Committee that comprises employees, management, trade union representatives and professional safety advisers.

While there has been a 7 per cent decrease in the number of reportable accidents this year versus last year, and a 27 per cent decrease in the number of major accidents, the number of total recorded accidents remained flat YoY. This is a result of a concerted communication programme by our Group Risk Department to ensure stores report all accidents, however minor. Inspite of this we remain confident that by 2013 all accident stats can be reduced, (although the level in 2010 was the lowest for some time for minor accidents).

The Group Safety team continue to provide an ongoing training programme for staff in stores made up of ‘modular’ training programmes, focusing on key risk issues, including fire safety. In addition, the team run monthly training courses for the Travel business store staff on issues around food hygiene. Health and Safety also remains a core topic that is covered in the Management Development programme for new managers.

We continue to benchmark our health and safety performance against our peers to ensure that we improve our approach in line with best practice. We do this through analysing their published performance against our own and also through collaborative working via the British Retail Consortium’s Risk and Safety Policy Advisory Group, which meets regularly to compare data and share best practice.

* Reportable under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrence Regulations