Safety is at the heart of Crown Highways’ values. The number one priority of the business on a day-to-day basis is to ensure each member of its workforce get home safely, and that all sites remain as safe as they can possibly be.
There are occasions and scenarios where potential hazards to its workforce are out of Crown Highways’ control, therefore risk management and prevention is paramount. Crown Highways’ focus on a ‘safety first’ culture, coupled with its investment into the business’ operational safety practices has seen Crown reach a remarkable milestone.
At the end of October 2021, Crown Highways achieved 1,608,913 working hours without a RIDDOR, with the last reportable incident recorded in February 2017.
There are several factors which has driven Crown Highways to achieve this success:
ROSPA gold
Crown Highways has been awarded this prestigious award for three years running in recognition of its practices and achievements in helping its staff/customers/clients/contractors get home safely at the end of the working day.
New plant / vehicles
Since 2017, the investment into vehicles and plant has been huge, and has seen nearly £3 million invested.
In 2021 alone, Crown has seen the arrival of 3 brand-new Grab Wagon’s, 2 new mobile elevating work platforms (MEWP’s), a brand-new beavertail, and Crown’s first electric van to just name a few.
The continued investment into new, high-quality vehicles is an added level of risk mitigation for Crown’s workforce.
Near miss & inspection app
The Crown Highways Safety Observation App was introduced in 2019. The rollout has increased the quality and quantity of safety observations, allowing Crown to act upon events that previously may have gone unrecorded and impossible to manage.
Safety stand downs
Safety stand down days allows Crown to reinstate the importance of safety to all employees and address any safety concerns that maybe be present within the workforce.
As a business, this provides an opportunity to receive feedback from those seeing potential risks first-hand and improve standard working practises based upon their input.
PPE
The introduction of an improved PPE standard meant that as of 2019, ARC flash PPE is mandatory on all sites. Crown also introduced a new standard helmet which complies with both EN397 and EN12492 standards to increase the safety of its highways workers.
Training Academy
The opening of the Crown Highways internal training academy in 2019 means that all training can be done in house. As a result, Crown Highways, led by Training Manager Rob Peters is able to go above and beyond on training opportunities for employees.
Mike Dale, Crown Highways Managing Director told us:
“To achieve 1.5 million working hours without a RIDDOR is an amazing achievement by our company, so thank you to every single person involved and a special thanks to our Health & Safety Manager, Pete Benton”
We will continue to invest in both our people and our resources and hopefully meet another Milestone in the near future”.
Pete Benton, Crown Highways Health and Safety Manager added:
“Reaching this milestone is a huge achievement for everyone at Crown Highways. It is down to the whole team’s commitment to safety that we have managed to work 1.5m hours since our last reportable injury which was back in February 2017.
In addition to this we have been awarded a RoSPA gold award for the last three years, again a huge achievement.
Crown always have and will continue to invest in training and the most up to date equipment to help everyone keep safe while carrying out their duties in a very high-risk environment.
Well done to the whole Crown Highways team, keep up the great work”.