Health and Safety Working Party

Welcome to the FMA Health & Safety Working Party which is designed to provide practical health and safety support and resources for companies operating in the facilities management sector.   The FMA runs a regular programme of health and safety forums that enable the sharing of best practice and the dissemination of helpful tools and other resources.   This section provides a range of practical resources.


FMA H&S Awards
The FMA invites you to participate in its ‘Safety Recognition Award’ scheme. The scheme is devised to recognise and reward facilities management organisations who have been successful over the course of the year in managing the risks to workplace health and safety.  An application form can be downloaded here. Completed forms should be submitted via email to: [email protected]


Benchmark Tool - Check-out your safety performance
Benchmarking is recognised as a process of comparing against a standard/best practice. Health and Safety benchmarking is a planned process by which an organisation compares its health and safety performance with others to learn how to reduce accidents and ill-health.

Benchmarking is not just about comparing data or copying your competitors. Benchmarking is more about continuously learning from others, learning more about your organisation’s strengths and weaknesses in the process, and then acting on the lessons learned. This is what leads to real improvement. Benchmarking is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

To this end, the FMA have annually canvassed its membership since 2008 to provide data on their Health and Safety performance. The annual request includes data for UK FM operations only and now provides a solid and consistent range of data over a four year period. The latest return of information (2011) provided data based on in excess of 230 million man hours of work.

All specific company data has been collated in confidence and the results detail the cumulative information relating to:

• RIDDOR Frequency rate (per 100,000 hours worked) including a specific look at the highest and lowest of the returns
• RIDDOR Incidence rate (per 1,000 employees)
• All injuries Incidence rate (per 1,000 employees)
  
  The latest FMA Health & Safety Benchmark can be downloaded here.

Training Endorsement
The FMA Health and Safety Working Party have launched a programme of formal endorsement for member companies’ training schemes. The aim of the programme is to acknowledge and promote excellence and subsequently recognise and drive continuing enhancement of standards across the industry.

Endorsement is based on the findings of experienced assessors who review arrangements, venues, material and competency of trainers. The review incorporates a scored visit against a scoring mechanism resulting in a completed assessment review form and if appropriate an FMA Endorsement Certificate.


Good Practice
Get bright ideas – see what others are doing in the FM sector
The Health and Safety Working Party of the FMA have developed a simple method for member organisations to share Good Practice in the Facilities Management. The objective is not to provide an exhaustive list of initiatives but to provide member organisations a vehicle to demonstrate their own Good Practice initiatives. Thus building a body of initiatives that member organisations may have access together with contact information with a view to sharing and promoting Good Practice with the Facilities Management industry and not reinventing whehels at every turn.

In practice member organisations present their Good Practice submissions to the FMA Safety Working Party. The FMA Safety Working Party will then assess and endorse, if appropriate, and then post on the FMA website as an example of Good Practice with relevant contact information. The submission may include additional information or presentation material to the Good Practice Summary sheet posted on the website.

The first two examples of this are:

Interserve –  Behavioural Safety initiative called  ”CATS” (download presentation)
OCS’s Sustainable Work Scheduling Tool (download presentation)
MITIE – The development of a positive safety culture to engage all staff (download presentation)


Current Working Party Members
Paul Richards - Paul is the QSHE Director at Interserve and a health and safety specialist and he is the Chairman of  this Working Party.
Chris Box - Chris is Head of Hard Services at OCS.  Chris is a facilities management specialist
Grant Cristall - Grant is the Operations Director for Vinci Facilities
Russell Bone - Russell is the National QHSE Manager at MITIE Group PLC