Health and safety

Legally reportable accidents

Safety Structures

Our principal safety management structures continued to operate broadly as reported last year, with some refinements:

• The composition of the retail safety steering group was extended to include better representation from stores operational management with periodic attendance from area managers and divisional operational managers. Both the retail safety steering group and the Beeston Site Safety Steering group continued to work well, driving the development of our plans for continuous improvement in our safety standards and safety performance.
• The governance committee, established to monitor our overall management of risks to the business (including health and safety), and chaired by an executive director continued to operate. It now meets more frequently than before (now monthly), and as a consequence of refining and simplifying routine presentation of performance data, is better focused on ensuring that progress with major planned activities is as expected. The operating module of the committee was extended to our Boots retail divisions (four in the UK); each division now has a divisional governance committee (chaired by the divisional director), which has oversight of each division’s safety performance and progress with safety improvement plans.

Integrated Safety Support Team

The composition of the safety support team remained largely as reported last year but with some changes in the responsibilities of individual advisers (to better align with business needs). In addition, the assistant retail advisers, appointed last year, obtained the NEBOSH Safety Certificate qualification and 10 of the safety team received basic fire safety training (to Fire Safety Technician level) so that we could explore some different ways of managing fire safety.

The Health and Safety plan

As reported last year our comprehensive retail safety plan was built around six principal themes:

• Leader-led safety
• Competent leaders
• Simple, effective tools
• New ways of working
• Monitoring performance
• Physical environment.

Leader-led safety

The most significant development here was the setting up in all divisions of divisional governance committees (following a successful trial in one division) to provide an effective mechanism for the management of all risks (including health and safety) through senior operational management engagement. The committees have worked very well and have provided invaluable insights (particularly for the Retail Safety Steering Group) as to the effectiveness of what we are doing and how to better support store management.

Competent leaders

Face-to-face training (by retail safety advisers) for store managers, continued throughout the year. In addition, similar training was developed for area mangers and, following a trial, was extended across one of our divisions. Our plans for 2011/12 will see all area mangers receiving this training by year-end.

Simple, effective tools

As previously reported, last year we launched a completely revised risk assessment approach. The new approach has been found to work well (and is complemented by an e-learning package on risk assessment). We have reviewed our approach in the light of incidents and experience to ensure we meet all relevant legal requirements. Consequently, in February 2011, we launched a number of additions to the risk assessment process to cover: stores with hatches leading to basements; delivery operations to airport stores; dealing with snow and ice; asbestos management; lone working; delivery operations using dock plates and the use of wheeled gondola display units.

This year we added two new modules to our suite of e-learning training packages; asbestos management and advanced training for dealing with violence and aggression.

New ways of working

Last year we organised a Safety Week across all our Boots UK stores, to emphasise our commitment to our health and safety aspirations. The event was very successful and was mirrored by a similar programme (concentrating on fire safety) at our Support Offices. This year we built on last year’s success and held two safety weeks for both stores and Support Offices. Briefly:

• The two store safety weeks focused respectively on managers leading safety; and publicising additions to our risk assessment processes and our new asbestos awareness training
• The two Support Office safety weeks focused respectively on: fire safety; and site traffic safety (this included holding listening groups to get feedback on various proposals for improvements to our site road traffic engineering)

Monitoring performance

This year we continued with our formal review (with Environmental Health Officers from our Lead Authority Partner) of standards achieved in our Boots UK stores (against the Health and Safety Executive’s safety management standard HS (G) 65 – Successful Health and Safety Management). The exercise involved joint assessments in around 65 stores with joint follow-up exercises to gauge the quality of remedial actions, where required. As last year, standards were generally found to be very good and, in particular, risk assessments were found to be of a much higher quality than before. Overall, the conclusion reached was that our safety management systems and standards were appropriate and our Lead Authority Partner is prepared to enter into a Primary Authority arrangement with us. An application to the Local Better Regulation Office has been made.

Physical environment

The physical environment in our stores is of course a key factor in securing the safety of both our customers and colleagues. As with most retailers, slips, trips and falls are a common cause of accidents and finding better ways of managing the associated risks has been a focus for some time. This year we:

• Concluded the development of entrance matting specifications for use where we have particular problems in dealing with the risks presented by wet weather
• Refined our risk assessment techniques used during the development of new fixtures and fittings (both for these designed in-house and externally)
• Carried out additional trials on escalators, adopting additional safeguards on our escalators (ie safeguards that go beyond those specified in the relevant British Standards or European Norms) to determine if they might decrease the numbers of accidents involving falls on escalators. The trials involved two different approaches: reducing the speed of travel by 20% (from the British Standard norm) and highlighting the edges of escalator steps and escalator landings. We need to monitor the performance of theses escalators for a little longer to reach valid conclusions about the effectiveness of these safeguards - this work will be completed in 2011/12

Fire Safety

This year we reviewed our technique for carrying out fire risk assessments and with an external service provider carried out a trial. The trial involved:

• The use of a very comprehensive question set and associated set of expected controls
• Uploading of completed risk assessments into an e-risk management tool. The e-risk tool allows the status of required remedial actions to be easily tracked, allows actions to be easily allocated to various parties and allows the overall state of all completed risk assessments to be seen at any one time
• Automatic allocation of remedial actions (through e–risk), removing the need, with previous approaches, for administrative work by store managers
• The assessments being carried out by both our external service provided and safety advisers (who had received the relevant fire safety training)

The trial approach worked as expected and the new approach (particularly in respect of our first use of an e-risk management tool) clearly has considerable advantages over the more traditional tool. We are still working through the results of the trial; the findings will inform our future planning for fire safety management.