Our goal is zero harm, not as a statistical target but as a moral imperative, which will be achieved by establishing a strong proactive safety culture.
Policies and practices
The Board recognises that the highest levels of safety are required in order to protect employees, product users and the general public. The Board believes that all incidents and injuries are preventable, and that all employees have the right to expect to return home safely at the end of every working day. The Group Chief Executive has overall responsibility for health, safety and environmental ("HSE") matters across the Group.
The Group HSE Director reports directly to the Group Chief Executive, and is responsible for the ongoing development and assurance of the Group’s health, safety and environment strategy known as Journey to Zero Harm. The Group HSE Director is a member of the Executive Committee and reports on the performance of all businesses against agreed limits and objectives. The Group Chief Executive reports monthly to the Board on all key HSE KPIs.
The Board requires that all businesses systematically manage their health and safety hazards, set objectives and monitor progress by regular measurement, audit and review. Each managing director is responsible for the implementation, management and ongoing compliance of health and safety within their business, and for providing adequate resources to satisfy the Board’s requirements. All managing directors have health, safety and environmental related objectives incorporated within their annual incentive plan.
Managers and supervisors in the Group’s businesses are required to ensure compliance with procedures, and to provide leadership and commitment to promote and embrace a proactive health and safety culture. The Board emphasises the importance of individual responsibility for health and safety at all levels of the organisation, and expects employees to report all hazards, to be involved in implementing solutions and to adhere to rules and procedures.
A key element in the continuous improvement of health and safety management is collaboration at all levels resulting in the sharing of best practice and lessons learnt from incidents across the Group’s businesses and the wider industry. Accidents, incidents and near misses are investigated, with actions generated to prevent recurrence.
Achievements
This year has seen continued focus on becoming a solid calculative organisation, ensuring our systems create data-informed discussions and decision making at all levels, with particular focus on:
- control of major accident hazards;
- injury reduction; and
- HSE risk management
Actions taken in delivering the HSE pan include:
- continued roll-out of the asset integrity management system;
- implementation of the electrostatic discharge protocols; and
- deployment of the Fundamental Safety Principles supported by the Leadership Guide and the provision of training.
Control of major accident hazards
Our Countermeasures & Energetics businesses are required to manage major accident hazards which are governed by stringent legislation within their respective operating countries. Over the last four years, we have implemented several processes to enhance our focus in this area by ensuring we design, maintain and operate with integrity. We continue to invest in modern processes and technology to remove our employees from exposure to energetic hazards. During the design of these processes we have placed more scrutiny on the application of process hazard analysis.
In 2019 we mandated that all Countermeasures & Energetics businesses would need to conduct regular reviews to identify the potential for major process safety events. The reviews are based on a “stress test” that addresses the following questions:
- Have potential major accident hazards been identified?
- Are there effective controls in place to prevent and contain a major event?
- Are these controls being actively monitored?
This year saw the fourth iteration of that review process, with an increase in the number of hazard scenarios being identified as the rigour of process hazard analysis matured. As a result of this maturing process, we continue to develop an understanding of our residual risks and throughout the year have taken further steps to reduce these to a level as low as is reasonably practicable. To help reduce our residual risks the implementation of a common computerised maintenance management system continues to be rolled out across selected businesses, improving management and accountability for safety-critical assets.
We continue to share best practice through the Technical Safety Committee, Technical Learning Group and our quarterly "Shared Learning" events.
Injury prevention
Injury prevention focuses on the reduction of injuries through the adoption of safety as an inherent part of everything we do. This is enacted through safety leadership, clear expectations, accountability and establishing a safety culture that drives learning and improvement, not blame.
This year we aligned our corporate reporting platform to the three pillars of HSE strategy, People, Plant and Processes, to better understand the root causes of our incidents and where to focus our levels of assurance. These additional data points will help our continued focus on becoming a learning organisation. This data has reconfirmed trends regarding musculoskeletal injuries due to the manual handling nature of some of our processes, together with slips, trips and falls. The relevant businesses continue to manage these risks whilst considering future automation.
With regards to leadership on safety, this again has never been more critical than during the pandemic. Business unit leaders continue to manage an evolving situation through the Chemring CV-19 Playbook, ensuring the appropriate rigour and governance through our change management process. Our focus on injury prevention, in response to CV-19, continues to place more emphasis on people’s emotional wellbeing, which is supported by the Healthy Workplace Sub-Committee.
HSE risk management
Safe delivery of our business continues through the management of risk and is built around understanding our hazards, and establishing clear expectations and consistency. Our HSE Management System Framework Standard puts our HSE policy into practice by setting standards on nine core elements across the Group to drive a robust and common approach to the management of HSE. Each business within the Countermeasures & Energetics sector is audited annually to ensure compliance, with high-priority non-compliances being reported and monitored at Executive Committee level. The changes made in 2022 to our Operational Assurance Statement process continue to help the businesses focus on compliance with the HSE Framework which in turn provides useful insights when planning the Line of Defence 2 (“LOD2”) audits. Safe delivery of our business continues through management of risk and is built around understanding our hazards and establishing clear expectations and consistency.
Our HSE performance
We measure our HSE performance to reflect both occupational and process safety. In doing so we have several data points, one of which is an external review of our prevailing safety culture. Last year we invited back a team of experts to review our progress. The review highlighted good progress as we journey towards becoming a high reliability organisation. The review confirmed our businesses as approaching a Group-wide calculative status, with robust processes and systems generating data and signals around our high-hazard operations. The level of collaboration has also increased, with many businesses sharing best practice on a regular basis to help accelerate our performance, all of which is supported by a positive tone from the top and underpinned by risk-informed, visible and proactive safety leadership. This year has seen a focus on supporting the leadership through the introduction of the Leadership Guide and the provision of training support.
Occupational Safety
Our safety performance in terms of our total recordable injury frequency ("TRIF") rate is currently at 0.90, which shows a slight increase when compared to last year's 0.78 but remaining below our annual limit of 1.
Most injuries were caused by slips, trips and falls, or were musculoskeletal in nature.
We focus not only on actual injuries but also hazards and near miss events. We therefore place an emphasis on near miss and hazard reporting as a leading indicator of our maturing safety culture. This year we had 3,097 occupational safety near miss and hazard reports, compared to 2,828 in 2022. We had a total of 12 high-potential ("HIPO") incidents compared to 13 last year.
We are embedding this learning into the organisation through quarterly Learning from Incidents reviews with all business leaders and increased use of Safety Alerts, not only to share incident learning but also as good practice.
Process safety
In addition to our reactive metrics we also measure process safety near miss events, with a total of 1,559 recorded in 2023 compared to 880 in the previous year. Near miss reporting is crucial if we are to understand and prevent incidents which is why we encourage all our employees to stop, warn and inform so we can manage any emerging risks. The increase in near miss reporting represents good progress as an organisation willing to learn and improve on a continuous basis. During 2022 we consolidated the reporting of our leading indicator for process safety events (“PSEs”), which are categorised as level 1, 2 and 3, with 3 being the event with the most serious potential. We set a limit of below 2 PSEs at level 2 and 3 per 100 production employees. This we exceeded our limit with a PSE rate of 2.87 (2022: 1.86). Having reviewed the data we believe this is down to improved reporting, due to a better understanding of upset conditions, and higher levels of data assurance with PSE events reviewed on a bi-weekly basis.
HSE strategy forward outlook
In 2023 we have continued to focus on maturing the plant and process elements of our strategy through the continued delivery key programmes such as the Asset Integrity Management Maintenance Systems and ESD Protocols. Towards the end of 2023 we focused on the people element of our strategy by introducing the Fundamental Safety Principles, with significant focus on every employee's duty to Stop, Warn, Inform, Manage ("SWIM"). These themes will remain out priority throughout 2024.
Our progress against this strategy will be reported in the next annual report and accounts.