E128:05 03 October 2005

Partnership with large organisations the way forward

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the Local Authorities Coordinators of Regulatory Services (LACoRS) jointly launched the Large Organisation Partnership Pilot (LOPP) today. The pilot will focus on developing closer partnerships to improve health and safety.

Acting Chief Executive of HSE, Justin McCracken, speaking at the launch said, “ This pilot is about customer-focussed and coordinated activities, aimed at finding the most effective approaches to partnership working with the aim of securing improvements in health and safety.”

LOPP has three main objectives:

• to present a more coherent customer-focussed face to large organisations, including managing a consistent and coordinated approach to inspection of multi-site organisations;
• to secure improvements in health and safety outcomes in the organisations and to use their influence more widely, for example, as exemplars of good practice or with the supply chain; and
• at a later stage, to begin preliminary discussions exploring whether the organisations are interested in some kind of formal recognition of good health and safety performance and, if so, how this might be achieved. This will feed into a separate work stream looking more widely at this issue.

17 companies, both LA and HSE enforced, are being invited to join the pilot. Between them, the selected companies employ around 1 million people. Already on board are Asda, Astrazeneca, BAE Systems, Greggs, and Tesco.

LOPP will enable both HSE and the local authorities to engage more effectively with the momentum of large organisations in the private sector, to help achieve better health and safety outcomes. The people best placed to make workplaces safer from harm are the staff and managers who work in them. LOPP aims to establish a truly reciprocal relationship between the regulators and the regulated.

Steve Edwards, Director of Operational Standards for Trading Law and Technical for Tesco has offered his support for LOPP, “ We naturally take health and safety very seriously and see this as a good opportunity to explore how we can work with the HSE and local authorities on a collaborative basis to find ways of further improving standards in our industry.”

Also attending the launch, were Mark Du Val, Assistant Director of LACoRS, Bud Hudspith of Amicus and Geraint Day of the Institute of Directors.

Mark Du Val commented, " The pilot will deliver significant benefits both to the organisations involved and to the local authorities and HSE as regulators".

Bud Hudspith said, “ I welcome this approach to improve partnership working - I believe it will produce real benefits for health and safety in the workplace. I am especially keen to see a strong element of worker involvement, and particularly the involvement of trade union safety reps".

Geraint Day also welcomed the pilot, " The customer-focused approach will make for more effective engagement between the regulators and the regulated, and should help to secure improved health and safety outcomes".

Notes to Editors

• LOPP is a pilot project testing different approaches to engaging with large organisations. Other work in both HSE and the local authorities is still ongoing with companies not involved in the pilot.
• One such piece of work is the Field Operations Interventions with Large Employers, dealing with companies employing more than 250 people. LOPP involved companies that employ more than 10,000 people.
• Local authorities are responsible for enforcement in shops, offices and parts of the services sector, particularly leisure. HSE is responsible for the health and safety enforcement in all other work places.
• LACORS (the Local Authorities Coordinators of Regulatory Services), a local government central body, seeks to make a major contribution to the development of high quality consistent and coordinated local authority regulatory services across the UK. Please visit www.lacors.gov.uk for further information.

Public Enquiries : HSE InfoLine, tel: 0845 345 0055, visit: www.hse.gov.uk/contact or write to: HSE InfoLine, Caerphilly Business Park, Caerphilly CF83 3GG.

Press Enquiries : Journalists only : Ray Allger 020 7717 6179

Out of hours 020 7928 8382