(Originally published March 2010)
At Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria,where a new fleet of nuclear submarines is under production, BAE Systems Submarine Solutions has effected a great change in the way it does health & safety, Georgina Bisby investigates.
As part of a major global engineering company, BAE Systems Submarine Solutions, knows it will be quickly in the press should anything go wrong. But a historical culture of secrecy, together with the restrictions of serving the MoD and operating a nuclear site has given the company little opportunity to talk about things that are going well. One such example is the introduction of a safety initiative that has propelled safety performance forward and put the company on course to achieving exemplar safety status.
As Ian Worrall, head of SHE and security at BAE Systems Submarine Solutions, explains, when it comes to health and safety the ship building industry had some catching up to do.
It wasn't until the late 1980s, when the Ship Building and Ship Repair Regulations ceased to exist leaving the industry governed by mainstream health & safety regulations that things started to move forward. This helps put the story of a Cherry Picker being dropped from 60 ft in the main ship building hall as recently as 2000 into some context. Frighteningly Ian suggests that BAE Systems Submarine Solutions was statistically one of the better players in the ship building market.
Thankfully it didn't take a major catastrophe to realise that things needed to improve radically. A cultural change programme, introduced in the late 1980s, made health and safety a management issue, but this created an imbalance between management responsibilities and professional dedicated health and safety provision which resulted in on-site safety staff being reduced to skeleton levels working in purely advisory roles. It became apparent that this wasn't suitable, and wasn't working.
Fighting fire with fire
Faced with a traditionally macho culture and the need to improve things fast, the company changed tact. Worrall says the safety team instigated more of 'an HSE role'."We went in with a heavy hand and met fire with fire, backed by a comprehensive training and education programme" explains Worrall who says staff were initially shocked to be issued with enforcement notices and have working practices stopped. "If you read text books they will probably tell you our hard line approach was wrong but it was the way we felt we had to do it; we took control, then started to give control back." Care was of course taken not to create a compliance culture, within which people only follow safety rules when safety personnel are around. The approach worked; the effect was a dramatic dip in accidents; within 9 months RIDDORRs (Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations) had been reduced by 40% (which from a business perspective was the equivalent of 22 paid welders).
This new enforcement drive was the first stage of a five year health and safety improvement plan called Safety First which began in 2003/04. After a year of cracking down on legal compliance, the programme shifted focus to management systems and how to sustain and embed them. This was no mean feat. The programme covered around 1000 activities across a broad spectrum of risks as well as taking into account the 260 or so pieces of legislation that governed the site.
This required well-trained staff and one of the key objectives of the Safety First programme was upskilling. All of the safety team members and Trade Union (TU) representatives (TU involvement has been an essential part of the programme's success) are CMIOSH or working towards it. They are also trained in specialist areas such as scaffold inspection where relevant. High staff retainment levels due to geographical location gives the company an incentive to train staff and helps save on the cost of buying-in expertise. Worrall says no outside consultants other than the training company they worked with have been involved in Safety First.
When the safety team take me around HMS Ambush, the second of the Astute fleet of nuclear submarines due to be completed this year it is easy to see why they believe (though they are happy to be challenged on this) that the construction of this submarine is the highest risk heavy engineering activity in the UK and possibly the world. The Ambush's 97 metre-long, 7400 tonne pressurised hull is home to more than one million components, a nuclear reactor and four turbines and up to 120 staff at a time negotiate the ships warrens to work on its miles of pipes and cabling.
The initial five year phase of the Safety First programme has come to a close now and at the Devonshire Dock Hall, where the Ambush, and the next ship the Artful are under construction, Worrall's team point out some of the fruits of its labour.
Although never registering at the top of the risk register, the incorrect use of knives had at one time been a cause of many minor accidents that nevertheless had a major impact on the business. Alternatives to knives were implemented where possible and where there were no alternatives, safer practices, including the use of cut-proof kevlar gloves, were implemented.
Elsewhere in the dock hall it is possible to see the safety benefits of the adoption of 'Vertical Outfitting' in the construction of Artful. Initial outfitting is now done with the pressure hull units placed in a vertical position rather than horizontally with specially designed, modular platforms enabling pipe systems and equipment to be installed more easily and safely.
Come together
Another success of the Safety First programme has been to encourage divisions to work more closely. At one time, safety staff had been forbidden entry into medical areas whereas now Worrall explains they are often drawn into doctor's consultations. Worall cites getting to the bottom of HAV (Hand ArmVibration) cases as an example where this has been useful. "By consulting the relevant safety supervisor the occupational health staff can establish whether symptoms of HAVs are being caused by a work process or if it's the £4.99 DIY shop grinder that they are using for a hobby in the evenings that has caused the symptoms." Without this kind of information someone may have been restricted from working without getting to the heart of the problem.
Statistics show at the end of the five year Safety First programme there had been a 90% reduction in terms of RIDORRS and known costs savings of £7 million. "It hasn't been an easy journey though," warns Worrall, "it's been three steps forward and one step back, and these successes have taken dogged determination."
The next stage
The objective now is to sustain and build on the achievements of Safety First through a new five year plan Safety First Plus.This time there is an added corporate driver in that the board wishes to achieve exemplar health and safety status to bring it in line with other leading global companies. To measure this they have adopted a hybrid version of the Shell Safety Maturity Matrix. An audit has confirmed that the site has achieved Level 4 in the Matrix (it was previously ranked as Level 3) and the aim is to reach exemplar level 5 by 2011. Part of this process is extending the lessons and benefits of Safety First to the nuclear and product parts of the business."It is about trying to close all the gaps, we want to be able to inform the board of the total picture of safety right across the business," explains Worrall which he believes will be a unique achievement.
What kind of improvements will Safety First Plus bring more specifically? A key aim is to bring health performance in line with safety. Safety First offered category 1 high risk employees same-day physio support whereas it may take up to a month for them to be seen by the NHS. Annual health checks were also introduced and where possible workers were offered support for non-work related health issues.
For example the company offers immediate support and counselling for employees suffering from issues such as stress for which they are otherwise likely to be put on an NHS waiting list. This helps the workers recover more quickly, makes them feel supported and of course gets them back to work quicker.
Worrall is now exploring ways of measuring and reviewing the effects of these improvements to build a picture of the workforce's health as a whole, "we will be able to for example look at the blood pressure of the whole company, and see how we're fairing" he explains.
Prevention rather than reaction
At the heart of Safety First Plus is a risk register compiled by Worrall and his team which covers 83 risks each of which are rated, red, amber or green depending on their status. Anything that's identified as red or red/amber triggers action by safety advisors who will conduct a thorough audit taking up to a week, as opposed to the day or half a day they would have been given in the past, which was often insufficient to get to the bottom of a problem. Worrall gives the example of a fire incident which traced cause factors back to supply chain decisions taken years before. The new regime's focus on prevention rather than reaction aims to avoid such issues.
Another key goal of Safety First Plus is to drive the health and safety message right through the company. Every process that can effect people is going to be 'safety firsted', when hiring people safety is now going to be part of that process as well as being included in performance reviews, training and so on for all staff.
For a glimpse of what the future looks like inside a company operating at exemplar status, nuclear safety regulation manager Bill Wilson tells the story of fitting the bridge fin on the Ambush. "We had developed a new work package for the process and it went extremely well, virtually defect free in fact but in retrospect we still could have done better." How? "We should have identified why it went so well. As well as preventing bad things it's key that you can also replay good things. The focus of a mature safety programme is repeating success."
