Health and Safety

Premier Foods is committed to operating high standards of Health & Safety, designed to minimise the risk of injuries and ill health to employees, contractors, visitors and others who come into contact with the business. The Group believes that Health & Safety is a fundamental ingredient to a successful business and we constantly review our standards for effectiveness, driving through and embedding a Health & Safety culture throughout the organisation.

Regular external audits are undertaken as part of the Group’s improvement strategy to help benchmark against both legal requirements and Company procedure. Through acquisition and restructure the base employee number has increased by a factor of more than three from approximately 5,000 employees at the start of 2007 to approximately 18,000 employees at the end of 2007.

All data within this report now represents the full combined business performance.
A business decision has been made to standardise on the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (“RIDDOR”) metric – per 100,000 man hours, rather than per 100,000 employees. This metric will be used moving forward as the key RIDDOR measure for the full business.

Premier moved from .59 - 2006 to .49 - 2007 RIDDOR frequency per 100,000 man hours. This represents a 17% year on year improvement for the full business.

While there is a good overall improvement trend it is still recognised that we need to improve on our performance and that all sites do not perform equally well. Safety focus during 2007 was therefore to assemble a combined business Health & Safety strategy. The strategy had to take into account the varying types of manufacture, distribution and office based roles.

Delivery of the strategy commenced during 2007 and will continue through 2008. Much of the framework of the strategy is taken from the Bread Bakery business which has demonstrated an excellent improvement curve over the past three years.

The 2008 Business Safety Strategy revolves around 4 key themes:

1. Clearly defined safety roles and responsibilities for all employees.
2. A management led safety improvement process that revolves around tours of the workplace to identify and remove hazards.
3. Independent safety audits for each site that produces a gap analysis and action plan.
4. Focus on process safety and the detail behind the safe control of the varying processes we run.

The base principle of the full strategy is a greater site focus on the removal of risk.