Health and Safety
At Countryside, we strive for continual health and safety improvement and promote social and ethical best practice.
Health and safety standards remain our number one priority, and we continue to improve and develop our operations to ensure we deliver a safe and healthy environment for all our stakeholders. Communication with our contractors and supply chain is key to our success. We continue to evaluate our health and safety performance as part of this programme of evolution and strive for continued improvement with the launch of our Health and Safety strategy in 2022.
Health and safety strategyOur commitment to continuous improvements
We maintained our annual injury incident rate (“AIIR”) below the industry average for the 17th consecutive year. Overall, our AIIR was 224 (2019: 227) compared to the Health and Safety Executive (“HSE”) national average of 416 (2019: 405). During 2019 we introduced a new accident and safety observation reporting system to identify any trending issues more quickly.
We maintained our annual injury incident rate (“AIIR”) below the industry average for the 17th consecutive year
Managing health and safety through the business
At a corporate level, the Board is responsible for managing health and safety risks. This responsibility is delegated to the Executive Committee and the Health, Safety, Environmental and Quality (“HSEQ”) Committee.
We strive for health and safety excellence, and the health and safety of our stakeholders is our priority. Our Health and Safety management system is certified to ISO 45001, and covers all our operations. Appropriate risk assessments and audits are carried out at key stages of our development process, from potential new operations to live projects.
We are committed:
- To remain in excess of 10% below the HSE national incident rate and the Home Builders Federation incident rate.
- To increase awareness of and compliance with occupational health by 10% through target-based focuses by 2023/2024.
- To ensure behavioural safety is improved by introducing the HSE SLAM technique to 100% of staff and contractors by 2023.
Our Senior Management team further demonstrated its allegiance to health and safety by signing a Health & Safety Pledge.
It is our policy to conduct our activities with due regard to the health, safety and wellbeing of our employees, supply chain and customers. To find out how we achieve this, read our Policy Statement.
Evolving our approach through technology
As a progressive business we also recognise that technology is the future for safety on construction sites and are supporting the development of proximity sensor artificial intelligence (“AI”) on forklift trucks to bring about advancements in risk mitigation. In addition to this, as a result of the repaid change in business operations due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we are working to deliver improved communication and training via a new online portal.