Our number one operational priority remains health, safety and the environment for our 388,000 employees and the 20 million consumers who eat and drink with us every day.
All management and Board meetings throughout the Group feature a health and safety update as one of their first agenda items. The Board reviews the Occupational Health and Safety and Food Safety policies annually to ensure that they each continue to reflect our aims and aspirations including any legislative changes. Supporting the Board is our internal Health, Safety & Environment Forum made up of technical specialists from around the Compass globe. It has become the key body responsible for promoting policy, setting standards, measuring compliance and sharing best practice in these areas across the Group.
To ensure best practice, we developed a set of policies, minimum operating standards and behaviours in 2007, which have been steadily rolled out across our business. We are pleased to report that in line with our published 2007 commitment, the programme has been successfully implemented across our ‘Top Ten’ countries (representing over 80% of Group revenue) by the December 2008 deadline. These standards are based on the strictest regulatory requirements and industry best practice.
This year, we have worked hard with our internal stakeholders to create a new occupational health and safety performance index, which was implemented across all countries from October 2008 and, in due course, will allow us to benchmark and continually drive improvement across our countries.
Health and safety has always had a special focus in our business and particularly for our offshore and remote site workplaces, where our clients demand the very highest operational standards. A good example of our success was receiving an award from our client Chevron UK in May 2008, in recognition of our UK business achieving the significant milestone of one million man-hours without a Day Away from Work Case at the Chevron Refinery Operation in Pembroke, South Wales. Further afield, our team in Qatar received a recognition award in May 2008 from their client RasGas for operating for 30 million man-hours without a single Lost Time Injury.
