Health and Safety

It has been an exciting time within the BSS Group with the launch of our Primary Authority Arrangement. We were delighted in February 2010 to become one of the first major distributors to sign up to the Primary Authority Scheme. We believe that the Primary Authority Arrangement is about sensible risk management with the regulator and the regulated working in partnership to ensure that the issues most likely to cause injury or work-related ill-health are prioritised and dealt with in a comprehensive, planned way across the whole of our 400+ sites. The BSS Group places health and safety at the very heart of its organisation and by entering into this partnership, we are demonstrating that we do not want to be part of the problem of injury and ill-health at work, we very much want to be part of the solution.

Commitment

The BSS Group's Board of Directors are committed to health and safety and demonstrate their commitment through documented systems of health and safety management. In addition the Executive Committee meets monthly whereby health and safety performance is reviewed at each meeting. Each member of the Board accepts their individual role in providing health and safety visible leadership therefore recognising their personal responsibilities. Our in house Health and Safety department is led by the Central Services Director, who is a member of the Executive Committee. The pivotal role of the health and safety team is to ensure continuous improvement across the Group by acting as health and safety champions, providing pragmatic solutions to the operational risks within the business to all levels of employees with a strong focus on behavioural safety and worker involvement.

Performance

We have continued to carry out a robust accident investigation programme with an emphasis on identifying root causes of accidents and ensuring that we do something to stop them reoccurring. Accident statistics for RIDDOR reportable incidents have decreased by 8.3%.

There have been no improvement, prohibition notices or prosecutions from the enforcing authorities from either inspections or accident investigations that have been undertaken.

The health and safety team have continued to undertake regular health and safety audits to measure performance of our health and safety management systems and have recommended improvements where necessary to ensure that all recommendations have been implemented. The team carried out nearly 300 branch audits / visits in the year ending 31 March 2010.

The health and safety training team have delivered 166 health and safety training days. 1,299 employees have received training on a number of courses commensurate with the Group Health and Safety Policy. In addition a further 427 employees have completed the online manual handling programme within the first week of employment.