Health and safety

The issue: There are many potential hazards within airports. From slips and falls in public areas to complex procedures involved in moving aircraft, fuel and heavy equipment. The maintenance, redevelopment and construction of new facilities across the airport, including Terminal 5 adds further risk of injury.

Ensuring the health and safety of everyone who comes into contact with our operation is crucial to the success of our business.

At BAA Heathrow, this includes the 67 million customers who use our airports each year, our 4,500 employees as well as contractors and business partners.

Our approach: This year BAA Heathrow has embarked on an ambitious programme of work designed to bring our health and safety management systems in line with the International Standard OHSAS 18001. Furthermore, we have taken the opportunity to integrate our safety management system, known as the ’Managing Responsibly System‘ with our environmental management system, which is currently being improved to align with ISO 14001. Once fully implemented, it will allow for a more streamlined approach to health, safety and environmental management and give greater focus and awareness across the airport community.

We also revised our health and safety policy to reaffirm our commitment to provide a safe working environment, safe equipment, open consultation with the workforce, suitable training and supervision, as well as adequate resources to manage health and safety. In the policy, we also made the commitment to work towards being incident and injury free.

Our policy and improved management systems will allow us to:

• Have robust systems on a broad range of health and safety disciplines, e.g. training, equipment safety, incident reporting and investigation.
• Give consistency to HSE standards and practices
• Make strategic decisions based on risk
• Make each employee and manager responsible for their own contributions towards health and safety by giving them to tools to act at a local level
• Assure the operation is meeting internal standards and regulations through audits and reviews
• Demonstrate that performance to our customers, third parties and service partners
• Monitor performance to ensure continuous improvement.

Health and safety matters are the responsibility of everyone at BAA. Senior managers are targeted to achieve specific health and safety objectives and systems are in place to monitor how we are progressing against these objectives.. Issues are escalated through line management and the business leader of each business unit is responsible for ensuring health and safety standards are met on a local level. 

BAA Heathrow directors meet regularly to review the performance of our Health and Safety strategy. They also meet with Trade Unions to discuss how we can make further improvements. Trade Unions Safety Representatives also meet with line management in their areas to resolve issues and improve safety at a grassroots level.

Every employee who works for BAA Heathrow receives health and safety inductions training bespoke to their role. Many receive additional training on topics such as airside driving standards, manual handling, risk assessment, accident and incident investigation.

To assure our standards of training and awareness, a significant portion of our front line mid and senior level managers completed competency based health and safety assessments. Following the assessment, managers were helped develop specific training plans tailored to the individuals needs.

Performance: We measure accidents to our staff, contractors, business partners and members of the public to help us understand the causes of incidents and to allow us to make improvements to prevent a reoccurrence.

Fatalities and major accidents
We are pleased to report there were no fatalities amongst BAA Heathrow employees or members of the public as a result of our work activities. There were 20% fewer serious accidents resulting in a senior management led investigation during 2006/2007 when compared to 2005/6. As a result of these incidents we will focus on management of contractors and working at height as part of our 2007 workplan.

Accidents by cause excluding Terminal 5
The charts show our main theme of accidents to be due to slips trips and falls, mostly on forecourts and escalators, we are working with operational staff to identify higher risk areas and to implement action plans where this is possible. Manual handling injuries are a major risk for those involved in our security operation and we ensure each officer is trained on how to reduce the risk of injury as a result of lifting hand luggage and other items. We have also introduced additional speed checks on airside drivers and a points system to encourage safer standards of driving. (Note: most of the traffic accidents are third party staff).

Accidents by cause – Terminal 5
Health and safety has been at the heart of Terminal 5 from the outset. By introducing programmes such as incident and injury free – a groundbreaking approach to behavioural safety, the Terminal 5 project has set new benchmarks for the UK’s construction industry. This, in addition to one of the most comprehensive on-site occupational health facilities has enabled Terminal 5 to maintain an enviable safety record which is all the more significant given its status as one of the largest and most construction projects in Europe.

Enforcement action
The company received two HSE improvement notices relating to the poor safety behaviour within a baggage handling area. In consultation with the users, a number of physical improvements to the area have been made and BAA are working with the handling agents to improve the safety practices within the area.

Fire safety
We have continued to develop the governance around fire safety through the Heathrow Airport Fire Board and the local Business Unit Fire Safety Groups. We have developed a number of local Business Unit technical focus groups dedicated to specific fie safety activities. These include groups to focus on the reduction of disruption caused by fires and false alarms.

We have worked closely with the property team to assist them in developing updated fire safety plans for all the buildings that are subject to the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. We have implemented a more objective set of fire risk assessment tools and training which are more accessible to all BAA staff.

Fire safety legislation
The change in fire safety legislation which took place in October 2006 went smoothly. The measures that were put in place to ensure that we could demonstrate compliance are now being evolved to ensure they fulfil the needs of the operational environment.

KPI targets
BAA Heathrow measures its performance in fire safety in many ways. The two primary measures area the number of unwanted activations of the fire detection systems (false alarms) and the number of actual fires that occur. The benchmark for false alarms is set out in a British Standard. We set ourselves stretching targets to reduce the number of activation which exceeded the British Standards recommendations.

The number of false alarms exceeded last year’s target by 18%. However, there were a number of success stories for example, Terminal 3 exceeded the British Standard recommendations by almost 50% and will be seeking further improvement over the coming months.

We experienced 52 small fires in the past 12 months, this was 11% over the target but was moving back towards the target by the end of the year.

The replacement of the fire alarm system in Terminal 4 is nearing completion. The recently completed fire alarm system upgrade in Terminal 1 has allowed the operational staff to better understand and manage activation and reduce the amount of business disruption caused by unwanted activation of the alarm system. We are working with all the operational teams to help them understand how they can get the best performance from these systems.

Our plans: The existing ‘Managing responsibly’ system is being enhanced and simplified so that it will assist in our objective of working towards OHSAS 18001. The embedding of the revised system will remain our primary objective for the coming year.

A number of airport wide safety initiatives and projects have been identified to improve the control of contractors and consolidate existing safety systems. These will simplify the access to safety information and increase the quality of the way all activities are carried out.

Following the success of the behavioural safety programme during the construction phase of Terminal 5, we have made the decision to roll the programme out into the live operation of Terminal 5 which will begin in earnest in March 2008. This will be the first time we have used a behavioural safety programme in our live operation and it presents exciting and challenging times.