QPA Health and Safety Best Practice Awards
FOSTER Yeoman have been crowned top performers in this year’s Quarry Products Association Health and Safety Best Practice Awards, scooping not only the top award for overall excellence in health and safety practice, but also the award for the best health and safety innovation for their company-wide rehabilitation scheme, the first of its type in the industry.
As well as an award for the best health and safety performance by an SME, awards were also made for achievements in five other key areas, each of which has been identified by the QPA as a crucial and topical health and safety ‘hot spot’: workplace transport; manual handling; bitumen storage and delivery; behavioural safety; and slips, trips and falls.
A total of 180 entries were whittled down to a shortlist of 36 contenders, all of which were visited and assessed by a panel of independent health and safety experts. The winners of each category (see panel), as well as the overall winner, received their trophies from QPA chairman Lord Sutherland of Houndwood and Sir Frank Davis, former chairman of the Health and Safety Commission, at a special presentation ceremony in London on 11 November.
Simon van der Byl, director general of the QPA, congratulated everyone who had entered the awards, in particular Foster Yeoman for their double success, and J. Clubb Ltd, one of the QPA’s many smaller members, for scooping the Frank Davis Award for good health and safety practice in smaller companies.
Speaking at the awards, Mr van der Byl said that QPA members’ strong emphasis on health and safety was reflected in the standard of the award entrants. ‘The quality has been superb,’ he commented.
He went on to remind the audience that this was the third year since the introduction of awards recognizing achievements in health and safety hot spots, a move which, he said, had been extremely successful in helping to address particular health and safety hazards.
‘The QPA Health and Safety Best Practice Awards scheme is a vital way for us to share best practice, and this is a crucial factor of success in helping us to reach the quarrying industry’s ‘Hard Target’ to halve the number of accidents in five years.’
He added that the ‘QPA Health and Safety Good Practice Guide’ was instrumental in helping to disseminate good practice throughout industry and that the 2003 version would be available shortly. ‘So many excellent health and safety initiatives are being implemented and it is critical that this information is shared among other sites that could benefit, not just locked away in particular sites,’ he said.
