RoSPA Press Office : Press Release
November 27, 2002
NEW GUIDANCE ON SETTING SAFETY TARGETS
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents has produced new guidance which details good practice in setting corporate health and safety improvement targets.
The document, Targets for Change, has the support of the Health and Safety Commission, the Institute of Directors, the GMB union, the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health and the Association of British Insurers.
It has been sent to more than 100 leading health and safety organisations asking them to circulate it among their members to stimulate debate.
The aim of the guidance is to help organisations to think through the issues involved in setting their own internal targets for improvement so that they can contribute to achieving national targets set by the HSC.
Roger Bibbings, RoSPA Occupational Safety Adviser, said: “National and sector targets have been set as part of the Government’s and HSC’s Revitalising Health and Safety and Securing Health Together initiatives.
“But if these are to be met, further work is needed by individual organisations on setting corporate, divisional and even departmental health and safety performance targets.
“When compared with most industrialised countries, Britain has a good occupational safety record, but there is still massive scope for further reductions in levels of risk, harm and loss associated with work activity across the whole economy. This is particularly true for small and medium-sized firms which are almost twice as likely to have accidents as their larger counterparts.”
He said every level of an organisation needed to discuss where they were now in terms of health and safety and where they wanted to be in the future. It was not simply about reducing lost-time accident rates, but about developing the processes that needed to be in place to stop accidents and ill-health from happening in the first place.
Targets could not just be plucked from thin air. They had to be based on sound data and analysis and agreed with internal and external stakeholders, including safety representatives.
RoSPA’s guidance has been produced after consultation with a wide range of health and safety professionals in high-performing companies and other organisations. For a copy, phone 0121 248 2089/2095 or e-mail rbibbings@rospa.com or lnguyen@rospa.com
