Health and safety

Our aim is to provide a safe and healthy environment for our employees and visitors to our premises and to keep the number of working hours lost through health and safety incidents to a minimum.

We monitor both the number of workplace injuries and illnesses and the number of “lost-time” workplace injuries and set a target to achieve rates of less than half of the averages for our industry.

We have our own behaviour-based safety programme, Safety STAR (Safety Through Accountability and Recognition), which requires supervisors to encourage safe work practices, promotes regular safety observations, encourages and holds employees accountable for working safely and regularly asks employees for their ideas and suggestions for improving safety at their facility. Two of our facilities in the US have achieved Safety STAR status.

In addition, two of the five US businesses: Cadillac Electric and MCM recorded no injuries and all five of our US businesses qualified for the US National Safety Council Occupational Safety Excellence Awards, having achieved lost-time injury rates of less than half the industry average.

All our UK facilities are accredited to OHSAS 18001: 1999, the internationally recognised standard for health and safety management systems.

The estimated cost incurred by our US operations for injuries resulting in days away from work in 2007 was $266,000. This cost is based on a $38,000 average cost per disabling injury (as estimated by the US National Safety Council). This cost includes wage losses, medical expenses, administration expenses and employment costs.

In Europe and Asia Pacific the estimated cost for injuries resulting in days away from work in 2007 was £35,649 applying UK estimates of £2,097 per occurrence, based on Health and Safety Executive figures.