Brammer Health and Safety
The Brammer Group strives to provide and maintain a safe environment for all employees, customers and visitors to its premises and to comply with relevant health and safety legislation. In addition the group aims to minimise the risk of work based accidents by ensuring systems are in place to address health and safety matters. The group encourages the involvement of employees and aims for continual improvement in health and safety matters through a formal structure with a reporting and review process. Compliance with health and safety policies and legislation is monitored on a country by country basis. The goal of the group is to achieve best practice in all its operations. Progress on implementation of country health and safety plans is closely monitored.
The group’s health & safety policy statement focuses on establishing a suitable environment, providing proper training and communication with employees.
Reports on health & safety performance are made to meetings of the board on a quarterly basis. A new format of health & safety reporting has been introduced in 2007 so that the board can monitor more carefully injury statistics and trends across the group, especially where there are RIDDOR incidents.
A major investment program in our National Distribution Centres (“NDCs”) over the past few years has given us the opportunity to introduce vehicle movement practices both on branch forecourts and indoors. This has significantly improved the workplace transport flows involved, separating workplace vehicle movements from people movements and significantly reducing the opportunity for accidents.
Brammer’s use of vehicles and the composition of its fleet are continually under review to ensure that the most appropriate vehicles are used for delivery from branches. Deliveries from the NDCs to branches are normally carried out by an external logistics company.
Brammer UK have accreditation to OHSAS18001: 1999 which require health and safety audits to be conducted at all locations and additional actions and controls have been implemented to ensure that employees can carry out their functions in a safe and effective manner. The accident reporting system has been extended to include reporting of all near misses so that lessons can be learnt and preventative actions introduced.
Other accreditations are Safecontractor for the installation, repair and maintenance of gear box system at customer premises. Approved House Assemblies – a certification mark by the British Fluid Power Distributors Association has been obtained.
Products are supplied to the NDC in Wolverhampton where they are stored and retrieved via a fully automated system of conveyors, cranes, racking systems and carousels, eliminating the need for any significant manual handling activity.
A driver online assessment programme has been introduced and implemented in 2007. The aim is to reduce the number of road accidents involving employees whilst driving company vehicles. Improved reporting of accidents will also lead to better accident prevention.
In France, the health and safety committee meets quarterly and continuously works on improving safety. This committee has made a major contribution in reducing the number of accidents in the past few years.
A health and safety committee was introduced in Germany in 2006. The external health and safety expert has extended audits to smaller locations in 2007.
In Spain, an external expert company ensures compliance with current legislation. A work risk prevention system has been established and is implementing actions to improve awareness of all employees leading to the prevention of accidents and work related illnesses. Routine medical examinations of employees are carried out in accordance with Spanish health & safety legislation in order to monitor the health of employees.
In other countries, external safety technicians have been appointed to carry out health and safety training of all employees as well as for new employees
If you would like to contact Brammer for more information, then please click here.