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With the large number of different hazardous jobs and practices involved in constructing a building, companies have to work hard to keep their sites accident free. Brymor Contractors is a company with an almost unrivalled record for health and safety, with some of the lowest accident rates in the business. Developing a reputation as one of the safest construction companies in the UK has been a strategy since the company’s conception in 1987, by the current MD Stephen Morton. Originally founded as a maintenance and decorating company, based in Portsmouth, Brymor has grown into an organisation that caters for all construction needs, and turns over approximately £35 million per year. Although the company has expanded steadily over the 19 years it has been in existence, it has retained the close-knit, highly personal structure that it started out with, so that Stephen Morton knows almost all of the 220 staff, individually.
From the initial single function organisation that it was in 1987, the company has grown and formed four separate departments, all dealing with different processes. There is a refurbishment division, which is concerned with maintaining, restoring and refurbishing; a new build division, which takes on major works; a housing division that erects bespoke houses and a painting division. These four departments work together to provide a complete service across the sector, making Brymor a highly versatile company, capable of taking on almost any project within the industry.
Many similar sized companies choose to have health and safety outsourced to consultants, so that they can conform to the required standards, however Brymor has formed an in-house team to deal with this side of the business. The health and safety director, Victor Collins, who heads up the team describes the system that has given the company such a strong reputation: “Every January we write a corporate safety plan for that year, which sets out our aims and objectives which we hope to put into action over the next 12 months. This plan is agreed by all of the directors, as well as the H&S team, and then applied throughout the company. To accompany this we have weekly meetings, and present to the board every month, along with formulating quarterly progress reports. We keep full accident investigation forms, we analyse any trends and causes, and then we focus our attention on those areas for the following year’s plan.”
By constantly reviewing the systems, and trying to eliminate accidents before they happen, the company has become successful in creating a safe working environment for its employees. The achievement can be marked by the recognition that the effort has received. Recently the company was featured on the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) website, as an example of a well-led and efficiently run organisation, in terms of H&S.
Brymor is in continual contact with the HSE to ensure that it is up to date with the changing regulations, and has received a number of different awards from various organisations, including the British Safety Council award for the improvements made to H&S, and a gold award from the construction industry training board. “Our aim is to improve safety by training, from the operatives upwards,” continues Victor, who is himself expecting to graduate and achieve his Masters in construction safety in the coming year. “To that end we either conduct in-house training, or we send our employees out on courses in order to make them proficient in handling the various, hazardous tasks which they can be involved in. All of our site managers are involved in our training scheme, which includes first aid training, scaffold awareness and many other courses relating to their projects. We invest heavily in training and aim to give a proactive rather than a reactive approach to managing health and safety on site.”
The support of H&S throughout the company, from the operatives up to the managing director has been one of the key factors in Brymor achieving the status that it now holds. “The team’s aim is to make everybody aware of safety; we have lots of communication systems in place to get the message across to all of the various levels, including toolbox talks, safety bulletins and instructions that we write ourselves. It’s all in the aid of broadcasting to the whole company that we aren’t simply paying a lip service to H&S. If you have no accidents you acquire a name for yourself in the industry, clients trust you, as well as your employees, you don’t lose time and effort through unnecessary actions. This emphasis is more than just safety related, it is a commercial decision made by the directors to improve the reputation of the company, and make us more successful. This has been recognised in 2005 by the chartered institute of building awarding one of our contracts mangers the Construction Manager of the Year Award and in 2006 Brymor won the Portsmouth News Business of the year award. We are, therefore, very proud of our record,” concludes Victor.
VTR
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