Network Rail awarded four prestigious health and safety management awards: Sword of Honour - Network Rail

Tuesday 29 Nov 2016

Network Rail awarded four prestigious health and safety management awards

Region & Route:
National

Four Network Rail Infrastructure Projects delivery teams have won the prestigious Sword of Honour award from the British Safety Council.

 

Four Network Rail Infrastructure Projects delivery teams have won the prestigious Sword of Honour award from the British Safety Council.

Network Rail was one of 64 organisations worldwide that achieved a Sword of Honour, which is awarded to companies which have demonstrated excellence in the management of health and safety risks at work.

The four teams - S&C North alliance, S&C South alliance, Plain line track renewals and High output track renewals - were each awarded five stars in the British Safety Council’s health and safety management audit scheme in the period August 2015 – July 2016, which enabled them to compete for the Sword of Honour.  They have also demonstrated to an independent panel of experts that they are excellent in their health and safety management throughout the business – from the trackbed to the boardroom.

Mark Carne, chief executive, Network Rail, said “It’s a real team effort to deliver safety results of this standard and I would like to personally thank the teams for the sheer determination to achieve this high status in just over a year.

There will be many people positively impacted by the steps they have introduced. We continually see that safety and performance go hand in hand, so not only will more people return home safely from work, but our customers will also benefit through our enhanced delivery performance.”

Mike Robinson, chief executive of the British Safety Council, said: “Leadership is a key factor in achieving excellence. You can legislate for compliance, but you have to inspire people towards excellence. The winners of the Sword of Honour and Globe of Honour Awards are exemplars of best practice and all have inspirational stories to tell about their journey towards achieving these accolades. These stories will inspire other organisations to follow their lead and move all employers towards our vision that no-one should be injured or made ill at work.” 

Notes to editors

About the awards
The 2016 awards mark the 37th consecutive year that the British Safety Council has awarded the Sword of Honour for health and safety management excellence and the seventh year of awarding the Globe of Honour for excellence in environmental management.

The winners achieved the maximum five stars in the British Safety Council’s independent Five Star health and safety and/or environmental management audits in the period 1 August 2015 – 31 July 2016. They also demonstrated to an independent adjudication panel that they had a proven track record and culture of best practice for excellence in health and safety or environmental management that runs throughout the business, from the shop floor to the boardroom.

About the British Safety Council
For more than half a century we’ve been a trusted guide to excellent health, safety and environmental management. We have educated millions of workers and made hundreds of thousands of workplaces safer for everyone. We do this by sharing information, supporting, advising, educating and campaigning. We are a membership organisation and a charity.

We would be grateful if you could use British Safety Council in full rather than abbreviating to BSC when quoting our organisation.

British Safety Council’s networks:
Website:                       www.britsafe.org
Twitter:                         www.twitter.com/britsafe
Facebook:                    www.facebook.com/britishsafetycouncil
YouTube:                     www.youtube.com/britishsafetycouncil
LinkedIn group:            www.linkedin.com/company/british-safety-council
Safety Management magazine:   https://sm.britsafe.org

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About Network Rail

We own, operate and develop Britain's railway infrastructure; that's 20,000 miles of track, 30,000 bridges, tunnels and viaducts and the thousands of signals, level crossings and stations. We run 20 of the UK's largest stations while all the others, over 2,500, are run by the country's train operating companies.

Usually, there are almost five million journeys made in the UK and over 600 freight trains run on the network. People depend on Britain's railway for their daily commute, to visit friends and loved ones and to get them home safe every day. Our role is to deliver a safe and reliable railway, so we carefully manage and deliver thousands of projects every year that form part of the multi-billion pound Railway Upgrade Plan, to grow and expand the nation's railway network to respond to the tremendous growth and demand the railway has experienced - a doubling of passenger journeys over the past 20 years.

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