Public reporting of health and safety performance

Being transparent through the public reporting of health and safety performance can enable an organisation to enhance the trust of its workforce, its investors and the public, and in doing so benefit its reputation.

HSE encourages all businesses, public bodies and third sector organisations with more than 250 employees to summarise their health and safety plan and performance and make it publicly available in their annual reports and on their websites.

This is an aspect of leadership.

Guidance

In order to assist large organisations to report publicly to a common standard, HSE has issued guidance that identifies 11 key health and safety issues that reports should cover - see Health and safety in annual reports 2001.

The 11 health and safety issues are grouped under the following headings.

Principles

• Broad context of the health and safety policy
• Significant risks faced by employees and the strategies in place to control the risks
• Health and safety goals
• Progress towards achieving health and safety goals
• Arrangements for consulting employees

Performance

• The number of RIDDOR injuries, illnesses and dangerous occurrences
• Details of any fatalities and preventative actions taken
• The number of employee days lost
• The number of health and safety enforcement notices
• The number and nature of convictions for health and safety offences

Targets

• Health and safety targets

Good examples

Examples of good public reporting practice may be found in the research that HSE has published on this topic (see below).

Research

The most recent pieces of research testing how organisations report on health and safety were published in 2005 and 2006:

• The public provision of health and safety information by UK top companies and major public bodies for 2004/05 (RR388). This is the third in a series of studies to investigate the level and quality of health and safety information made publicly available by the UK’s top companies, Government Departments and Agencies, NHS Trusts and Local Authorities.
• Study of the public reporting of occupational health and safety performance in 2005 by UK businesses with over 250 employees (RR515). To determine the level of reporting of health and safety matters in the websites, annual reports and other publicly available documents (including health and safety reports, corporate and social responsibility reports, sustainability/sustainable development reports etc) of 300 companies operating in the UK with more than 250 employees who had not been included in previous health and safety reporting studies.

Further source of information

• Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA)
• GoPoP: Going Public on Performance – measuring and reporting on health and safety performance