We are committed to embedding health, safety and wellbeing into everything we do, wherever we work, to minimise harm.​

Our safety and wellbeing performance in 2022 shows considerable progress in making positive interventions to improve both safety and wellbeing outcomes for our employees.

30,000+

safety interventions

In 2022, we made 31,008 interventions to improve employee and stakeholder safety. This compares with 19,578 in 2021 and 4993 in 2020. In terms of staff wellbeing, there were 7268 interventions last year, almost double the number in 2021. 

7000+

wellbeing interventions

Overall, our accident record is good: low numbers were reported, and the number of lost time accidents (LTAs) continues to decline. There were four LTAs in 2022, resulting in seven lost working days. In 2021, 10 LTAs and 109 lost days were recorded. Across the business, there were 129 accidents in 2022, a slight increase on the 98 reported in 2021.​

Reporting of mental health and wellbeing impacts is rising. Last year, there were 289 reported cases of work-related ill health that resulted in 1641 days lost. This compares with 248 cases and 900 days lost in 2021. Data from the next few years will show whether the increase is due to heightened societal awareness, better reporting mechanisms or workplace changes.  Our wellbeing programme supports staff in understanding their personal wellbeing factors and we are actively working, through our wellbeing champions, to mitigate stress at source in our project delivery through an integrated risk assessment approach.​

You can find out more about our safety and wellbeing journey here.

Culture of safety reporting

Our drive to embed a positive safety culture throughout the business includes raising the percentage of staff reporting the action they have taken to create a safer and healthier working environment. The chart below shows the reduction in our overall accident incidence rate (AIR – the number of injuries x 10,000 / number of employees), which remained low despite the return to office-based working as Covid-19 restrictions were lifted. Positive interventions (PI) have risen sharply, reflecting an increase in the percentage of our staff reporting incidents from under 20% in 2020 to 50% last year. The number of PIs is high compared with similar organisations – a sign of our positive reporting culture and that we are steadily moving to our target for zero harm.

Accident incidence rates have fallen in recent years