Blog

21 November 2017

Aiming for zero – the journey to a world-class safety performance within our industry

A blog from our Operations and Technology Director, Ben Hackett

Workplace safety is a top priority across all our operations. As part of our culture we have extremely high standards on all aspects of health and safety performance, and it is my role to ensure that this culture permeates across each of our businesses.   

Our commitment to health and safety is non-negotiable and is a fundamental part of the way we do business. While we have made great strides in reducing our lost time injury (LTI) rates over the past five years, there is still much more that we can do and we continue to embed the step change needed to achieve this.

Many of our people from field to factory, logistics to commercial and customer facing roles operate varying levels of machinery with different levels of risk as part of their daily responsibilities. It is our duty to not only protect our employees but contractors, suppliers and growers from across our supply chain too.

We have a robust governance structure through which each of our businesses take ownership of and implements according to their own cultural, educational and operational requirements. 

Driving performance

We aim for zero lost time injuries across all of our operations.

We’ve worked hard over many years to reduce our incident rate in many ways. Our management systems, work processes and procedures are more robust and we provide training programmes for our people to broaden their awareness of eliminating risks and adopting safer working practices – examples of which can be found in the latest CR Report update.

For us, part of our journey has been to ensure that the way we work and our behaviour is reflected in the actions we take around health and safety. It doesn’t just mean looking after those in our factory operations. It means looking across the end-to-end supply chain; from growers in the field through to our people in all locations and sites, and how we distribute our products.

Our performance over the past five years has seen a steady decline in our LTI rates across all of our businesses although it is true to say that our rate of improvement has slowed recently. We recognise the tremendous amount of hard work and effort that has gone into achieving these results, but at the same time, we are redoubling our efforts to drive our performance closer to zero.  I take it very personally to ensure that our health and safety culture is fully embedded within each of our businesses.

Our commitment

We will continue to do what we are doing now, but better. We will continuously evolve our management systems, work processes and behaviours to ensure they are fit for purpose for today’s world and tomorrow’s. We will take inspiration from the changing world around us to further improve our systems and procedures.

To become an even more sustainable business, health and safety performance is crucial. Our achievements to date demonstrate the journey we have been on, but we mustn’t be complacent. Our desire to do more will remain as we strive to achieve our target of zero incidents.