We have a fundamental duty of care to ensure the safety and wellbeing of all our people. We are committed to achieving the highest standards of Health & Safety, ensuring that appropriate resources are available to meet our objectives of a zero-harm work environment.

The paramount importance of health and safety was a key imperative behind the measures successfully introduced by the Group to mitigate the risks posed by COVID-19 to our people. These included regular medical check-ups, restrictions on travel, social distancing protocols, stringent hygiene measures and the provision of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Our approach to developing a sustainable safety culture is based on three principles:

providing a safe working environment; providing comprehensive implementation plans built around best practice safety and compliance standards; offering comprehensive training focused on risk awareness and reduction.

Our approach

The nature of our work and working environments means that our employees and contractors are regularly exposed to risk. We are constantly monitoring and identifying health and safety risks to ensure that our risk controls and working practices are the safest they can be. We believe our stringent approach, which involves continually updating our work protocols and risk controls to effectively manage safety-related risks leads to better safety outcomes.

Our safety management framework covers all aspects of safety compliance, monitoring, and training. Our safety management system focuses on ensuring compliance with our safety standards to provide a safe work environment.

It is structured around:

critical minimum safety standards that are aligned with industry best practice (Global Minimum Requirements); regular safety audits that benchmark our facilities’ compliance in implementing our GMRs; regular safety and risk awareness briefings and information updates for our staff and contractors; regular and high quality daily safety walks organised at each terminal; regular health and safety training for line management and employees staff; regular training drills covering general safety issues; specialised training programmes for employees that need it, for instance for those involved in handling hazardous materials; regular monitoring of the health and wellbeing of our employees aimed at improving and maintaining their wellbeing and reducing the incidence of occupational illnesses.

Governance

The Board has overall responsibility for health and safety matters and is committed to continuous improvement in our safety culture and systems. The Board sets Heath and Safety policy, agrees on safety standards and reviews performance. The Chief Operating Officer is the senior executive responsible for health and safety compliance and performance monitoring. The Chief Operating Officer regularly reviews feedback and performance reports supplied by the individual business units and the Board receives quarterly performance reports.

The Group’s safety performance is regularly reviewed by the Board and any decisions taken are discussed and agreed with the executive team.

Performance in 2020

The pandemic and the health risks posed by COVID-19 made it imperative that we redouble our efforts to safeguard the health and safety of our employees and achieve a zero-harm working environment. Our focus was on ensuring compliance not just with COVID-related measures but with our fundamental health and safety standards and controls, so significant attention was paid to improving all aspects of health and safety communications.

During the year we continued to focus on our Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) measure, a key safety metric. It is very reassuring to report that despite the disruption caused to our operations by the pandemic and notwithstanding the fact that our facilities continued to run uninterrupted throughout 2020, we achieved our best ever LTIFR at 0.54 incidents per 1 million exposure hours, making further progress on the prior period’s strong result. This improvement was due to ongoing commitment from the senior leadership, positive support from all management levels, strong employee engagement and allocation of appropriate resources.

LTIFR

Over the course of the year, we made significant progress in specific focus areas:

safety walks — we organised regular and high quality daily safety walks. By the end of the year, the required frequency of audits had reached almost 100%; introduction of mobile safety app — to improve the audit process and ensure that all safety incidents are promptly processed and recorded, we developed a unique mobile telephone application that has been installed on the mobile phones of the responsible employees of the terminals; staff involvement — the involvement of personnel in safety issues. In this direction, all terminal employees have access to a light version of the above mobile application, which allows any employee to promptly make an appeal on security issues; systemised training — in the implementation of regular training programs at terminals on the response and action of personnel and emergency services in the event of a fire, incidents with dangerous goods, people falling into the water, etc. As a result, the personnel training processes have been given a systemic and non-formalized character; safe movement of staff — we focused on improving the lay-out of routes and paths used by our employees at our terminals to ensure their safe movement; safety procedures — to improve how we educate our personnel on safe working methods, we developed and introduced a series of short visual reminders for employees on the main handling processes.

Safety remains at the core of the Group’s values and we will continue to strive to achieve a zeroharm environment.

In 2021, we will continue to improve the safety processes and controls we enacted last year. In addition, we are focused on the implementation of the Fatal 5 program, within which we will reduce risks in essential areas:

Safety under the crane Work at height Work with hazardous cargo Work with contractors Speed limit

In addition, we will create and develop the work of the Safety Committees at the terminals.