Health & Safety

Countryside Properties is committed to developing, maintaining and continually improving safe systems and places of work, in order to ensure the continuing health, safety and welfare of the Group's employees, sub-contractors and anyone else who may be affected by our activities.

We fully comply with all health and safety legislation. The Group is committed to reducing its incident and accident rates to the lowest possible level, whilst also providing good on-site welfare facilities. During the reporting period the Group was re-certified to the OHSAS 18001:1999 standard.

The purpose of our Health and Safety Policy is to promote a proactive approach to the prevention of accidents in the workplace. This is achieved by identifying hazards and eliminating risk, whilst providing safe working systems and compliance with all relevant statutory legislation, regulations and codes of practice.

Our incident and accident rates have remained below the National Incident Rate (IR) during the reporting period. The Group's IR averaged at 895 reportable incidents per 100,000 persons employed (545 in 2005), compared with the National IR of 981. We intend to maintain our incident rate below the National IR.

Incident Rates

During the reporting period there were no Prohibition or Improvement Notices (none in 2005) issued to us by the Health and Safety Executive.

In consultation with the Construction Industry Training Board and the British Safety Council,  we are utilising a number of Key Performance Indicators to benchmark our performance. The average score across the Group now stands at 90% (2005 - 87%), compared to our target of 80% and the industry's target of 60% which indicates legal compliance. This was determined by twice monthly visits to all our construction sites by our Health and Safety Officers. Additionally, all our offices and sales centres are visited on a quarterly basis.

To promote change to working practices we encourage staff and members of our key supply chain to attend, wherever relevant, our health and safety specific training courses. We also provide mandatory site specific health, safety and environmental induction training and toolbox talks for all site based workers.

The Group has fully endorsed the Construction Skills Certification Scheme and is committed to 100% compliance for all staff and sub-contractors visiting or working on the Group’s sites (within six months of commencing employment). To date 91% (2005 - 90%) of the Group’s employees that require a CSCS card have obtained them. The remaining 9% are new employees who are in the process of obtaining certification.

To raise awareness amongst communities of the dangers of construction sites, we continue to engage wherever possible with schools and colleges to pass on the health, safety and environmental messages.