Health & Safety Policy

British Sugar is committed to ensuring the health, safety and welfare of its employees at work and others who may be affected by its activities. Nothing is more important than health and safety and our target is to eliminate all injuries, by creating a culture of preventing injury and ill health at work.

Our health and safety management system will be used as a tool to help manage health and safety activities.

We will comply with all legal requirements and will continually improve our health and safety performance.

We will provide a secure work environment by ensuring all significant risks will be assessed and effectively managed.

We will maintain our sites and plants in a technically sound condition and ensure our teams and our contractors are competent to work on site.

All employees, and those working on behalf of the company, have a responsibility for the health and safety of themselves and others who might be affected by their actions. We will ensure they are well informed, engaged in, and committed to safety improvement programmes.

Safety Objectives

The UK and Ireland Leadership Team objective for 2008/09 is to reduce Lost Time Accident frequency rates to 4 per million hours worked including Contractors.

All injury accident frequency rates will be similarly reduced to 45 per million man hours worked.

This will be achieved through activities at various levels throughout the organisation as follows:

• The UK and Ireland Leadership Team will extend their participation in the improvement programme through activities such as Safety Reviews, Business Forums, Behavioural Audits, and Safety Award Schemes.
• External Audits will be carried out at every site to provide an impartial assessment of progress. In addition cross site audits will carried annually on matters of evident concern. Lessons learnt from internal audits will be shared with all sites.
• Over the next two years, risk management strategy will be reviewed to ensure the business has a good understanding of all significant risk, accountabilities clarified, priorities set.
• Imbed the Change management assessment process.
• Contractor management and project management procedures will be integrated to further refine improvements in this critical area.
• Focus on replication of best practice and benchmarking, making improvements in the incident feedback systems and improve the quality of incident investigation to aid replication.
• Through good occupational health management promote health and well being.
• At Central Offices and Holmewood Hall each function will have a Safety Improvement Programme.

Specifically at operating sites the following will be key focus areas:

• Every manufacturing site will refocus on  behavioural audits, targeting behaviours and activities which will reduce lost time accidents, improve the ability of individuals to identify hazards and better understand risk perception.
• Each site will significantly improve housekeeping and will instigate formal housekeeping audits.
• Make improvements to fire management and detection, noise management and chemical permit to work systems and significant work equipment (PUWER).
• Develop first line supervisors in their important role in managing safety.
• Every individual shall have a Safety Performance Discussion and this will be extended to line managers of term contractors.