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 2007/08 is to reduce reportable Lost Time Accident frequency rates to 2.5 per million man-hours worked including Contractors. All injury accident frequency rates will be similarly reduced to 50 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 participate in the improvement programme through activities such as Safety Reviews, Business Forums, and Behavioural Audits.
• External Audits will be carried out at every site to provide an impartial assessment of progress, in addition cross site audits will carried out on slips, trips and falls and lessons learnt from internal audits will be shared with all sites.
• Change management assessment strategy will be devised and implemented over the next two years, starting with physical change.
• Contractor management and project management procedures will be integrated to further refine improvements in this critical area.
• Every individual shall have a Safety Performance Discussion and this will be extended to line manager of term contractors.
• Focus on replication of best practice and benchmarking, making improvements in the incident recording systems and the quality of incident investigation to aid replication.

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

• Every manufacturing site will revitalise behavioural audits, targeting behaviours which will reduce lost time accidents, improve the ability of individuals to identify hazards and better understand risk perception.
• Each site will target initiatives to reduce slip, trip and fall injuries as part of formal housekeeping audits.
• Make improvements to fire management, noise management and permit to work systems.
• Through good occupational health management promote health and well being.
• Develop first line supervisors in their important role in managing safety.