Health & Safety

The health, safety and welfare of our people and anyone else affected by our work are very important to us.

In 2007, we launched ‘Safety starts with you’ a fresh approach to safety across all our operations. The aim of ‘Safety starts with you’ is simple: to reduce the number of AFR (Accident Frequency Rate) reportable accidents to zero by 2012 and develop a positive safety culture by improving people’s behaviour.

A lot of our work, especially our maintenance contracts, takes place is in hazardous environment. We also carry out work that could present a real risk to the public.  Through ‘Safety starts with you’, we have a fully integrated approach to safety; in layman’s terms, this means bringing together leadership, learning, coaching, teamwork and performance monitoring to ensure that Balfour Beatty Infrastructure Services people and the travelling public are safe on the road.

We operate a ‘just’ culture and encourage all our staff to report hazards and discuss safety concerns. In exchange, we ask all our people to take responsibility for their own health and safety and the safety of those affected by their work, and we expect them to comply with the arrangements we put in place:

• in the event of a conflict between the demands of the business and safety, we expect our employees to give priority to safety
• wear personal protective equipment when it has been identified as being necessary
• report near misses and all accidents so that we can learn from problems, share information and work together to prevent accidents and ill health 
• keep work equipment in good repair and report defects promptly
• keeping work areas tidy
• not working under the influence of drugs and alcohol or when ability is impaired for any other reason

Our robust, integrated approach has delivered a safety management system certified to the acknowledged best practice specification, OHSAS 18001.

We give the health of our workforce an equal priority and have implemented programmes to provide regular health surveillance and support staff who suffer from work related problems. We comply to the health and safety regulations in place in regards to HAVs and noise and review these on a regular basis.