We recognise our commitment to the welfare of our staff, contractors and visitors in and around the workplace. This means reducing, or eliminating risk as an ideal, and controlling and protecting where elimination is not possible.
In 2009 there was one less accident than in 2008. More pleasingly however, there was a significant reduction in reportable accidents with a 48% reduction on the previous year. Lost time accidents also fell, as did the number of days lost whcih mirror these numbers. The accident incident rate (i.e. the number of reportable accidents per 1000 employees) fell to 11.6 in 2009 compared to 21.4 in 2008, which reflects the positive work completed in the year.
Accident monitoring has greatly improved in the past 12 months, with a signficant investment in the development of a new accident and incident trending system. Incidents are captured at each site and the root causes of these incidents are found and elimiated to ensure they don't become the accidents of the future. All of our sites share issues and focus on key learnings on a weekly basis. Slips, trips and falls along with manual handling are two of the biggest sources of accidents within the company and their reduction remains a key priority.
Investment in, for example, the blockformer towers and automatic cheese de-boxing systems at Taw Valley has signficantly reduced the amount of manual handling. Similarly, investment in automatic case packing and robotics at Oswestry has had a positive effect.
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