Health and safety governance

This year we made real progress on bringing our health and safety management systems in line with the BSI standard OHSAS 18001. During 2007 we combined our safety management system, known as the ’Managing Responsibly System‘ with our environmental management system. The updated system is designed to be more effective and efficient and is aligned with the international standards ISO 14001. We will be rolling this system out across Heathrow business units in 2008.

The revisions to the systems will be supported by the introduction of a new licencing process for ground handlers which sets out specific delivery standards in all areas of our relationship including Safety and Fire Safety. Consultation with ground handlers commenced in 2007 and will continue during 2008.

Our policy and improved management systems will allow us to:

• Have robust systems on a broad range of health and safety disciplines, e.g. training, equipment safety, incident reporting and investigation.
• Give consistency to Health and Safety Executive (HSE) standards and practices
• Make strategic decisions based on risk
• Make each employee and manager responsible for their own contributions towards health and safety by giving them to tools to act at a local level
• Assure the operation is meeting internal standards and regulations through audits and reviews
• Demonstrate that performance to our customers, third parties and service partners
• Monitor performance to ensure continuous improvement.

We have also been working closely with service providers to improve the quality of their safety management systems and performance. We are pleased to report a further improvement in service partner compliance throughout 2007. Our service partner team are helping those currently below the standard with improvement plans to achieve a minimum 85% audit score by the end of 2008.

Health and Safety policy

We re-issued our health and safety policy to all staff. We commit to provide a safe working environment, safe equipment, open consultation with the workforce, suitable training and supervision, as well as proper resources to manage health and safety.

The policy reinforced our commitment to work towards being incident and injury free and a programme was developed during 2007 to extend the excellent standards of safety set on the Terminal 5 site to the rest of the airport site and operations.

Incidents and accidents

We measure incidents and accidents to our staff, contractors, business partners and members of the public to help us understand the causes of incidents and to allow us to make improvements to prevent a reoccurrence.

Fatalities and major accidents
We are pleased to report there were no fatalities amongst BAA Heathrow employees or members of the public as a result of our work activities. However we sincerely regret the death of a contractor at Terminal 5 this year (see section below). There were seven incidents requiring senior management investigation in 2007. The learning points from these incidents have been added to the revisions to the Managing Responsibly System and reinforce our commitment to delivering the safety behavioural change programme during 2008.

Accidents by cause excluding Terminal 5
The charts below show the main reasons for accidents as ‘slips’ ‘trips’ and ‘falls’, mostly due to spillages or with no obvious cause. We continue to work with our cleaning companies and facility inspectors to react to reported spillages quickly and have regular inspections to identify slip and trip hazards across our building portfolio.

Manual handling injuries continue to be a major issue for those involved in our security operation. We train all our new security officers in how to reduce the risk of injury when performing searches or lifting hand luggage and other items. We provide an annual refresher for existing staff.

During 2007 we deployed physiotherapy resources into the workplace during operational peak periods to support our staff and prevent injuries. We also support staff in the early stages of an injury.

This year we met our target for reducing lost time injuries to staff and reduced the rate of reportable injuries occurring by 43% over the year.

Accidents by cause – Terminal 5
Health and safety has been at the heart of Terminal 5 from the outset. By introducing programmes such as Incident and Injury free – a groundbreaking approach to behavioural safety, the Terminal 5 project has set new benchmarks for the UK’s construction industry. This, in addition to one of the most comprehensive on-site occupational health facilities has enabled Terminal 5 to maintain an enviable safety record which is all the more significant given its status as one of the largest and most construction projects in Europe.

We sincerely regret that there was one fatality in 2007 at Terminal 5 in a contractor controlled area. A supervisor of a lift installation team was working in the base of a lift shaft when he suffered fatal injuries following a controlled movement of the lift that the team were installing.

Enforcement action

The company received an improvement notice from the Health and Safety Executive in 2007 as a result of an injury to a member of staff at one of our storm water outlet systems. The primary elements of the notice relate to the definition of the maintenance activities at task level not being adequately completed along with several design issues. The compliance actions have been completed to the satisfaction of the inspector and we now waiting for formal closure of the notice.

Fire safety

The Fire Boards for each area of the business units have been aligned with common terms of reference and reporting tools. A standard scorecard detailing performance against common metrics was implemented detailing key aspects of compliance which we review with the Airport Fire Service and London Fire Brigade monthly. Fire safety performance is reviewed monthly by the directors and improvement targets and actions agreed.

Engineering Technical Leadership support our Fire Board to co-ordinate operational and construction fire safety activities across the portfolio and define Fire Strategies for new assets. They work with the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, Building Control and operations teams to ensure new systems perform well. A new fire alarm system at Terminal 4 followed this model, being completed and tested during 2007.

KPI targets

BAA Heathrow measures its performance in fire safety in many ways. The two primary measures are the number of unwanted activations of the fire detection systems (false alarms) and the number of actual fires that occur. The benchmark for false alarms is set out in a British Standard. We set ourselves stretching targets to reduce the number of activations which exceed the British Standards recommendations.

The number of false alarms exceeded the target by 15% in 2007. We commenced a programme of improvements to reduce the likelihood of unwanted alarms occurring and have set ourselves a stretch target for 2008 to further encourage improvement.

We experienced 47 small fires in the past 12 months and 22 of these were classed as significant (where operations could be affected). This was above our target and we took steps to improve our management of fire safety for our own assets and to improve our management of third parties.

Issues and approach
Our plans