Safety performance
Our ultimate goal is zero injuries or accidents for all our locations for both employees and contractors.
Here you'll find our latest safety results, as set out in our 2012 Annual Report. The figures are for calendar year 2011.
Measuring safety performance
In line with the international OSHA (Occupational Safety & Health Administration) standards, we use two key measures of safety performance:
- Recordable incident rate: the number of injuries requiring treatment beyond first aid, per 200,000 hours
- Lost-time accident rate: the number of recordable injuries that resulted in either a) restricted work activities, or b) lost work days, per 200,000 hours.
Overview of the year
Our safety performance improved in calendar year 2011 with our recordable incident rate decreasing by 10% and our lost-time accident rate decreasing by 30% versus 2010. We are now operating at around one lost workday accident per million hours worked. However, the safety performance of contractors working at our facilities remains below that of our own employees and is therefore an area we are focussing on.
Results for the year
While in practice we make no distinction between employee and contractor safety and we report combined rates in our Group key performance indicators, for regulatory reporting purposes we report on employee and contractor safety separately.
Recordable incident rate
- employees, improved by 20%
- contractors, improved by 4%
- overall, improved by 10%
Lost-time accident rate
- employees, improved by 37%
- contractors, improved by 24%
- overall, improved by 30%
External benchmarking
To put our safety performance in perspective and because many of our employees are located in the USA we monitor US industry averages. In 2011 our safety performance was better than the average achieved by companies across both our own and other industry sectors in the US.
Outlook
We are committed to implementing a world-class safety culture that delivers world-class safety performance. We are encouraged by the progress made in 2011, in terms of the improvements in our safety management and control arrangements and the results achieved. However, we still have much to do to achieve our ultimate goal of zero accidents and the safety performance of contractors is something we will continue to focus on in the year ahead.
Safety reporting notes:
- We report safety performance for Tate & Lyle owned and joint venture manufacturing facilities, and for Tate & Lyle offices and research and development facilities, globally, for the period 1 January to 31 December 2011.
- We report safety performance by calendar year because we are required to do so for regulatory purposes.