Corporate report

Coal Authority health, safety and wellbeing plan: 2022 to 2025

Published 18 July 2022

1. Foreword

The health, safety and wellbeing of the communities we serve, our people and those we work with is always at the heart of our thinking and approach. We exist to manage and advise on many of the risks and liabilities of Great Britain’s mining past. We’re a 24/7 incident response organisation and work closely with a range of emergency responders and other partners to carry out our work. Our supply chain are also key to working safely with communities.

Our 2022 to 2025 health, safety and wellbeing plan builds on our previous experience and learning and is informed by best practice from partners, regulators and advisory bodies. We focus on our core responsibilities to keep people safe, provide peace of mind and protect and enhance the environment and to do this we must continue to support and develop our people and work with those in our supply chain keeping a clear focus on safety while reinforcing the importance of health and wellbeing.

Key aspects of the new plan are to make health, safety and wellbeing easier for everyone who works for or with us to engage with and take responsibility for. This will include simpler policies and processes and the use of technology. We will bring behavioural health and safety more to the fore of our approach, ensure appropriate training is delivered, enhance our health and wellbeing services and take learning from others through engagement and benchmarking.

By working together we make a great place to work and deliver on our mission of making a better future for people and the environment in mining areas.

Lisa Pinney MBE Chief Executive

2. Where are we now?

2.1 An organisation with an excellent health and safety record

We have strong commitment throughout the organisation, a positive culture and a mature management system that supports our record of low numbers of accidents, low severity and low levels of work related ill health and absence.

We collaborate closely with our contractors, regulators and other organisations to learn from them and share best practice to continually improve our performance and support others to do the same.

3. Where do we want to be?

An organisation that continues to improve its health and safety record and supports the overall health, safety and wellbeing of its people, those that work with us and those we serve.

4. How we will achieve it

4.1 Policies and Procedures

Create policies and procedures which are accessible to everyone and seamlessly integrated into our business processes, so that health, safety and wellbeing is embedded into everything we do.

To ensure they are consistent, we will work with relevant teams, our Safety, Health, Environment and Wellbeing (SHEW) Group and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) networks to develop a clearly defined policy and procedure approval process.

We will ensure policies and procedures are created with the end user in mind, following best practice accessibility principles to ensure they are user friendly.

We will involve relevant teams, the SHEW Group and EDI networks when reviewing and updating policies and procedures.

Policies and procedures will be integrated into team processes when possible to avoid duplication.

We will ensure training on policies and procedures is role based and takes account of individual learning styles and accessibility needs.

4.2 Higher risk activities and safeguarding the public

Build on the knowledge and understanding of our high risk activities and property to continually improve measures which safeguard the health, safety and wellbeing of our people, those that work with us and the public.

To ensure we maintain and build on competencies under the Construction, Design and Management Regulations, we will implement enhanced training and provide effective mentoring for operational delivery teams.

We will work with our site based operational teams to increase engagement with our partners including contractors, to continually build our capability in managing areas of high risk activity.

We will work to evolve our emergency response capability to most effectively engage with other agencies and support continual improvement of our management of public safety, related to our underground estate.

To support the changing nature of our activities, we will implement procedures and train operational teams in the application of the Mines Regulations to ensure these are understood and we have the capability to deliver works that fall under them.

We will support the development and implementation of a holistic property governance process to maintain public safety throughout the full lifecycle of our property ownership.

4.3 Health and wellbeing

Expand the scope of our health and wellbeing plans, to include all issues that may impact mental and physical health to improve the overall wellbeing of our people, those that work with us and those we serve.

We will continue to review and update our mental health and wellbeing plan to build on the great work we have done, extending its scope and reach to our people, contractors and those we serve.

To ensure it reflects the needs of all our stakeholders, we will involve our groups, EDI networks and delivery partners in reviewing, updating and delivering the plan.

To help target relevant improvement areas and support interventions, we will utilise information from our employee assistance programme and ill health statistics.

We will work with our people and organisation development team to roll out the Edenred benefits platform and monitor its effectiveness.

We will continue to support the successful implementation of hybrid working.

We will ensure our people survey includes questions on health and wellbeing so that we can measure our performance against others and identify and implement action areas to continually improve.

4.4 Behaviours

Develop and deliver a behavioural health, safety and wellbeing programme that supports the achievement of consistent behaviours and ensures everyone involved in our work is a positive role model.

We will review and update personal health, safety and wellbeing responsibilities to ensure they are appropriate and effective in supporting our health, safety and wellbeing plan.

We will define what good looks like, identify barriers to achieving it and implement a behavioural health, safety and wellbeing safety programme that empowers individuals to challenge beliefs and attitudes, supports our culture and ensures everyone is a positive role model.

The programme will form an integral part of the values based behavioural framework, which is to be developed and implemented as part of our core business objective to create a great to work for everyone.

4.5 Technology

Implement technological changes to the way we capture and record information to improve our understanding and management of health, safety and wellbeing risks and opportunities.

We will implement a best in class online health, safety and wellbeing system that supports our health, safety and wellbeing plan. This will provide a platform that maximises our understanding and ability to manage our health, safety and wellbeing risks, improves efficiency so that we can optimise the time we spend on positive interventions and makes health, safety and wellbeing management as simple as possible for our people, contractors and the public.

To help us to improve across all our activities, we will continue to evaluate the scope of the health, safety and wellbeing system and utilise all useful functionality.

4.6 Benchmarking

Regularly undertake third party best practice audits to baseline our performance and support continual improvement with the aim of being amongst the best organisations in our sector for health, safety and wellbeing.

We will undertake the best practice British Safety Council 5 Star Health, Safety and Wellbeing (HSW) Audit every 2 years beginning in 2022.

We will use the outputs from the audits to continually improve our performance with the target of achieving a 5 star rating by the March 2025.

To ensure we learn from others and they can learn from us, we will continue to engage with the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) health, safety and wellbeing team and other similar organisations to support continual improvement.

4.7 Timeline

Between 2022 and 2023 we will:

• review and update approval process for policies and procedures so that it is inclusive
• update policies and procedures that are accessible and practical to follow
• build internal capability for working to the Mines Regulations where applicable in public safety and mine water treatment work
• review results of our people survey and use it to continue to improve our health and wellbeing support
• review, update and implement revised personal HSW responsibilities
• complete the British Safety Council 5 Star HSW Audit aiming for 4 stars
• implement a cloud based system to support the efficient and effective management and reporting of HSW

Between 2023 and 2024 we will:

• establish a role specific e-learning programme for policies and procedures
• develop and implement contractor engagement programme to maintain and build capability
• evaluate the outputs from the British Safety Council 5 Star HSW Audit and implement action plan for improvement areas
• build a behavioural safety programme that supports our culture and ensures everyone is a positive role model
• assess opportunities and make recommendations to utilise the full functionality of the cloud based system to further improve HSW management
• support the continued implementation of property lifecycle management to manage public safety across our sites

Between 2024 and 2025 we will:

• implement a behavioural safety programme that supports our culture and ensures everyone is a positive role model
• complete the British Safety Council 5 Star HSW Audit aiming for 5 stars
• implement recommendations for utilising full functionality of the cloud based system to further improve HSW management
• continue to engage with the BEIS HSW team and other similar organisations throughout the plan period to share learning and best practice
• evaluate effectiveness of the HSW plan and engage with stakeholders to develop future plan