Corporate Health and Safety Strategy 2007 – 2010
Introduction
Monitoring
Reporting structure
Aims
Corporate health & safety policy
Introduction
This Health and Safety Strategy has at its heart the concepts of Sensible Health and Safety. Being “risk aware, not risk averse” is built into the Council’s whole approach to managing risk in all aspects of its service provision. Sensible Health and Safety awareness will be key in ensuring that managers can deliver on their service priorities whilst ensuring the risks are managed in a sensible, proportionate and legal way.
This strategy has been endorsed by the Leader, the Corporate Governance Committee, Chief Executive and the Risk Management Board (RMB) and supports the implementation of the Corporate Health and Safety Policy. It provides the direction for improvement of health and safety performance across all areas of the Council’s activities. The corporate annual Health and Safety Improvement Plan is based on this strategy and Departments will include, within their own departmental Health and Safety Plans, their contribution to meeting this Strategy.
This Strategy supports the Council’s three priorities and in particular supports the Priority of Maximising Wellbeing by addressing the potential health and safety risks from the Council’s service delivery.
This strategy will be reviewed annually and amended where this is necessary.
Monitoring
To ensure that the Aims set out in this strategy are met, an annual Health and Safety Improvement Plan will be developed that sets actions on the Corporate Risk, Health and Safety Team, the Health and Safety Executive Group, and on departments. The Health and Safety Executive Group is responsible for agreeing the Corporate Health and Safety Action Plan and for monitoring progress against it.
Departments will provide the Health and Safety Executive Group with copies of their annual Health and Safety Plans and provide reports on progress against their plan.
Reporting structure
The performance of the Health and Safety Executive Group will be monitored by the Risk Management Board which acts on risk issues on behalf of Corporate Management Team. The Corporate Risk Manager will provide information to the Risk Management Board to enable this. The Health and Safety Executive Group will also report to the Governance Committee in the annual report.
Aims
The aims of this strategy are to deliver improvements to the capacity for the Council to handle risk effectively and produce a performance management framework that will enable it to demonstrate improvements made in the management of health and safety and the contribution that it makes to the overall handling of risk and achieving of outcomes.
The principle health and safety Aims of the Council up to the year 2010 are:-
Aim 1
To build “Sensible Health and Safety” in to the Council’s health and safety culture
Desired outcomes
To raise the awareness of what sensible health and safety consists of.
To develop oversight arrangement of occupational risk decisions to ensure that they are appropriate, legal and balanced.
To ensure that adequate safety management systems are implemented at all levels that enable the Council to have the assurance that all parts of the organisation are adequately meeting their legal obligations and the corporate policies and standards.
Aim 2
To ensure that the Council is a “learning” organisation by improving the way health and safety incidents are recorded, investigated and how lessons learnt from internal and external organisations are communicated.
Desired outcomes
To provide improved ways to enable staff to report any safety related incidents to their manager, improve the number of incidents investigated and improve the quality of the investigations undertaken.
To develop ways in which any useful lessons learnt either from other departments or external organisations are communicated to other managers within a department and to other departments so that the maximum value is obtained and safety performance improved.
Aim 3
To improve the way that health and safety performance is measured and monitored.
Desired outcomes
To identify key areas of health and safety performance.
To identify the most effective and meaningful data, both reactive and proactive
To measure the performance.
To establish systems to measure, analyse and publish the data.
To ensure that the data is used as part of the planning process to improve health and safety performance further.
To develop a consistent approach to auditing within and across departments, focussing on those key areas that influence improvements in health and safety performance.
To measure the safety management systems adopted at all levels of the Council against the HSE’s Successful Health and Safety Management Guidance HSG 65.
As part of a “learning organisation” to establish effective benchmarking with other similar organisations where appropriate.
Aim 4
To develop leadership skills for managers that improves health and safety performance.
Desirable outcomes
To identify what good leadership in health and safety looks like, and, working with trainers and lead managers, communicate this to managers as part of the leadership competencies drive.
Ensure that health and safety leadership skills and actions are developed for senior managers who operate at a strategic and policy level, for middle managers who operate at a planning and objective setting level and managers who operate at the service delivery or implementation level.
Aim 5
To ensure that all people involved in delivery of the Council services have the appropriate levels of competency to address their health and safety responsibilities.
Desires outcomes
To ensure that all individuals, including elected members, senior managers, employees, volunteers and contractors/partners who help deliver the services have the level of competency to complete their role safely without causing unnecessary risk to others who could be affected.
To ensure that any training or development necessary to achieve this is identified, quantified, planned and resourced to ensure that success in this aim is delivered.
Aim 6
To ensure that where the Council contracts out work to other organisations or works in partnership with other organisations the occupational health and safety risks are properly and satisfactorily addressed.
Desired outcomes
To ensure that where the Council supports activities undertaken by others, consideration of the adequacy of health and safety arrangements will be part of the process in selecting projects to support.
To ensure that all work undertaken by or on behalf of the Council (or where activities are led or supported by the Council) that these are undertaken with appropriate levels of health and safety built in. The Council will need to ensure that all contract and partnership documentation adequately addresses health and safety performance and suitable monitoring arrangements are established to ensure the level of performance required is met.
August 2008