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Safety strategy

Our Group-wide safety strategy has four main elements:

• Leadership and Behavioural Safety
• Designing for Safety
• Public Safety
• Occupational Health

Each of our operating companies has a long term health and safety strategy, supported by an annual plan, to achieve our objectives and take forward these elements.

Leadership and behavioural strategy

We believe that strong visible leadership at all levels is crucial, and have actively developed our safety leadership programmes. Our 2007 focus is on leadership by supervisors.

Secondly, our behavioural programmes seek to engage and involve all our workforce, to build a strong and robust safety culture. We also work with our customers to support their behavioural initiatives.

Designing for safety

To achieve the levels of safety to which we aspire, we believe that we need to go far beyond Behavioural Programmes and find ways to design out hazards at source. Our Designing for Safety initiative accelerated in 2006, and all businesses now focus on it.

For example, we increasingly focus on pre-fabrication off site, modularisation and standardisation to reduce the on-site risks. At a local level, we have numerous initiatives to address working at height, to improve methods to unload flat-bed delivery vehicles and to develop steel work with integral edge protection.

Public safety

Building on our 2004/5 Group-wide review of public risks, we maintain a focus on this critical area. Our businesses and projects have all identified risks to third party safety and have put risk controls in place. Each business has a public risk action plan to maintain the focus, and actively reviews and monitors this.

Occupational health

We have raised the profile of occupational health management over several years.

Each operating company has arrangements for identifying and managing occupational health risks on site, and for identifying individuals with potential work related health problems.

Our current aim is to make occupational health arrangements just as familiar as safety. We are increasingly providing screening to detect early signs of occupational ill-health, and run campaigns on specific health issues – manual handling, vibration and noise for example.

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