A proactive approach has been consistently maintained throughout the year to foster and strengthen a positive health and safety culture among our employees, contractors, and housebuilder partners. Particular emphasis was placed on the effective integration of colleagues from recently acquired businesses and ensuring alignment with our culture across an expanded group of stakeholders. Health and safety remained highly visible across the organisation through regular contributions to our fortnightly live 'All Staff' company updates, frequent postings on the internal intranet, the distribution of targeted health and safety bulletins and personal engagement.
During the year, a cloud-based health and safety reporting system was integrated into the regular auditing and inspection process. This aimed to enhance the efficiency of the reporting of observations to contractors and housebuilder partners, while simplifying and automating the submission of evidence when issues have been addressed.
Following positive engagement with contractors and housebuilder partners, the implementation has led to faster response times, increased participation from housebuilder partners, and a general improvement in the quality and transparency of closeout actions taken to resolve health and safety issues.
The integration of the new reporting system along with improved participation of stakeholders contributed to an improvement in the business’s “5 Star” engagement programme metric. Improvement was also generated by placing a greater emphasis on our health and safety advisors in involving the site managers of housebuilders and contractors when undertaking site reviews and Urban&Civic project managers developing engaging content for the consortium meetings to encourage attendance.
The combined efforts resulted in improvements in achieving the performance target of each participant for the year of 3.5 stars over the period of time on site. 50 percent of direct contractors and 38 percent of housebuilders achieved or exceeded this target an overall improvement of 9 percent over 2023/24.
High health and safety standards were consistently maintained across the business through the setting and achievement of targeted annual objectives. A structured programme was undertaken to further develop the health and safety management systems, with progress monitored through both internal and external reviews and audits. These standards were recognised as 'comprehensive' in the findings of an external audit. Performance was regularly reported to, and monitored by, the Executive Management Committee, the Board, and the Sustainability and Health & Safety Committee.
We found Urban&Civic’s health and safety management systems to be comprehensive to manage health and safety risks arising from its business.
Systems Concept – external auditor
Values