Health, Safety & Wellbeing

Our approach

At Kelda, our belief is that nothing we do is so important, that we cannot take the time to do it safely.

Our vision of “Taking responsibility for the water environment for good” and our plan to deliver this vision is set out in our 25 year Blueprint. To achieve our plan, it is essential that we work to prevent harm and protect health across all stages of our business operations, environments and communities.

We are committed to achieving this and continually ensuring that everyone can go home safe and unharmed at the end of each and every day.

Everybody who works for, or with us, is responsible for getting health, safety and wellbeing right. Good health, safety and wellbeing standards and performance are critical to the success and sustainability of our business.

This means that:

• We never ask anyone to compromise their health and safety or that of others, in the name of Kelda.
• We all look after ourselves and each other - when things aren’t right, we won’t walk by.
• All incidents are avoidable but if things go wrong, we will always find out why and put them right.
• We are committed to keeping ourselves and each other safe and well and to demonstrating the right behaviours.
• Everyone’s opinion on health and safety is important.

This will be achieved by:

• Ensuring that health, safety and wellbeing comes first in everything we do and in all decisions that we make.
• Creating safer and healthier workplaces
• Establishing clear expectations, standards and processes that we all work to.
• Ensuring that we are trained to know, understand and care about health and safety

This will be delivered through:

• Everyone demonstrating health and safety role model behaviours and excellent personal leadership.
• Everyone contributing to discussions and activities to improve health and safety.
• Promoting and recognising everyone’s involvement in health and safety.

Remember that nothing we do is so important, that we cannot take the time to do it safely. We have great, enthusiastic and hardworking people at Kelda. We are passionate about doing a good job and providing a great service for our customers. However, we will not do something unsafe or unhealthy to get the job done. If what we are doing or about to do is unsafe, we will stop the job and seek help and support. Nothing we do is worth getting hurt for and if we can’t do it safely… we simply won’t do it.

Strategy

Our aspiration is to drive excellent standards and performance to ensure the health, safety and wellbeing of all our people. We achieve this by seeking to:

• Deliver the essentials very well.
• Demonstrate leadership.
• Communicate performance.
• Engage all our people

Our strategy is underpinned by four key areas of continuous improvement which are fully integrated into our business planning processes:

Performance

Identify and deliver strategies focused on performance visibility and communication that will allow the business to identify and understand the key trends, common factors and underlying root causes and to utilise this knowledge to drive systemic and sustainable improvement to both our health, safety and wellbeing performance.

Put simply – we seek to learn and improve at every opportunity

People

Review our organisational structures and activities to ensure that they are effective at delegating accountability and delivering performance throughout all levels of the business.

Support our people in the execution of their roles and responsibilities by providing clear expectations, skills and competence development and effective performance management and support.

Put simply – we ensure our people our competent, confident and capable

Process

We will review our occupational health and safety management system (OHSMS) to identify its fitness for purpose at providing a clear and systemic means of translating regulatory, legislative and group company health and safety policies and expectations into defined policies, standards and procedures which are readily available for all colleagues and partners.

We will ensure that our tools and techniques are simple, communicated and accessible and provide efficient and effective means to support our OHSMS and performance improvement.

Put simply – we provide clear frameworks for our people to think health and safety first across all our activities.

Plant

We operate a significant number of reservoirs, water treatment, waste water treatment, energy generation facilities, pumping stations, water distribution and sewerage networks and work closely with our Engineering Reliability, Operational, Asset Management and Asset Delivery teams to understand and reduce the asset based impacts on our health and safety.

Put simply – we focus strongly on personal health and safety and the process safety of our operational assets and infrastructure.

Performance

Our business leaders review health and safety performance on a regular basis:

• Kelda Directors review health and safety incidents every week; business performance every month and significant incident learning and trends every quarter. This performance and key learning is shared with the Kelda Holding Board on a bi-monthly basis.
• Our business unit leadership teams review health and safety incidents weekly and performance trends monthly.
• We have a consistent cross business process in place to ensure that we respond promptly to any health and safety incident and with the support of our health and safety advisors, technical authorities and trade union colleagues. We ensure that we identify underlying root causes, implement actions to prevent reoccurrence and share this learning across our business.

Health & wellbeing

Safety

Duration of absence

Trend of absence causes (days)

Wellbeing

All Kelda colleagues have access to an online Wellbeing Centre which utilises established helplines and online support resources. This is a collection of highly recommended resources with a proven track record to offer a variety of quality advice.

The Wellbeing Centre is maintained on a regular basis by Occupational Health Advisors with current expert advice tailored specifically to Kelda colleagues. This enables us to provide a flexible approach to individuals across the business and deliver a value for money service.

This service will offer a wide range of support on the following:

• General Health
• Wellbeing
• Online CBT
• Finance
• Legal Advice
• Pensions Advice
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Addiction Support
• Child Support Help