With 51,000 employees, over 4,000 branches and a fleet of over 16,000 vehicles, the safety of our people and property is essential to our operations. Our employees’ activities include the manual handling of heavy objects, mechanical lifting, operating machinery and driving between our own sites, as well as to those of our suppliers and customers; these include construction sites that are inherently more hazardous than our branch locations.
Effective management of our health and safety programme helps to minimise the risk of injury to our employees, customers and suppliers and damage to property; reduces costs associated with employee illness, injury and loss of physical assets; reduces the risk of legislative breaches; and protects our reputation. We always aim to identify areas for improvement and, where good practices exist, share them across the Group.
During the year, we introduced a Group health and safety policy. High quality health and safety programmes were already well established in our operating companies. The significant improvement was to define, for the first time, commitments, standards and metrics that could apply consistently to all of our operations. The policy is supported by a Letter of Commitment signed by the Group Chief Executive and by the Continental Division Chief Executives.
Implementation of the policy has been supported with a number of standard tools to help operating companies assess their current health and safety practices, identify areas that require improvement and develop plans and targets. The European and North American divisions worked together closely to align their practices, to ensure that data was collected in a consistent format and to identify efficiency improvements.
The Company also established an internet-based data site, which facilitated cost-effective communication in different time zones.
In support of our objective to further improve health and safety performance in all of our operations, in 2008 we stated our intention to introduce health and safety performance reporting based on KPIs common to the Group.
Three key measures were introduced during the year to provide consistency in reporting in all of our businesses: medical injury rate, lost workday rate and fleet collision rate. These indicators were selected as the most appropriate measures for our business, based on their direct and indirect moral, legal and financial impact on our operational performance. These measures will help us to better identify areas where strong performance and best practices can be shared across the Group and identify activities that may benefit from additional resources and training. We are now able to benchmark performance within all businesses in the Group and have a firm basis for assessing progress and trends over time.
The results of this analysis can be found below.
| FY 2009 | |
|---|---|
| Medical injury rate Number of at-work injuries requiring medical treatment per 100 employees. |
4.41 |
| Lost workday rate Number of workdays lost per 100 employees. |
44.61 |
| Fleet collision rate Number of third-party vehicle collisions per 100 vehicles. |
18.52 |
1 Excludes DT Group (4,655 employees) which was unable to report data this year.
2 Excludes DT Group (1,172 vehicles) which was unable to report data this year.
While it is currently too early to report trends in safety performance at the Group level, a number of our operations have reported significant improvements in their safety performance compared with last year. In the US, Ferguson achieved a 40 per cent reduction in fleet collisions and a 17 per cent reduction in employee medical injuries. Wolseley UK reported an 18 per cent year-on-year reduction in its employee medical injuries and a 30 per cent reduction in its lost workday rate. A number of initiatives have helped to achieve these improvements.
Our employees receive health and safety training appropriate for their role. This includes training on safe driving techniques, the operation of plant and equipment and general health and safety awareness. For example, in the UK monthly safety bulletins and awareness campaigns focus on specific safety topics. In the US, over 5,400 delivery drivers, sales and management employees have completed a web-based driver training course during the year. Both the US and UK businesses also operate internal awards programmes for outstanding health and safety performance and safe driving and have been recognised by external national awards for their achievements in these areas.
We will report further on our health and safety performance and initiatives in next year’s report.
Through the maintenance and continuous improvement of our health and safety management practices, we have been successful in reducing the frequency of personal injuries and vehicle accidents. This in turn has led to efficiency improvements in our operations.