Health and Safety

People’s health and safety is an important part of our purpose. It extends across everyone who works in our organisation to clients, partners and communities around the world. We take a pro-active approach, embedding health and safety in our advice and designs to deliver projects and services that are safe to build, use and maintain. To ensure we maintain a safe and healthy working environment and make continuous improvements, our vision, policies, and processes are incorporated into our Integrated Management System. Our practices comply with the international standard on Occupational Health and Safety Management ISO 45001:2018 for which our certification was continued in 2023.

An awareness programme across the organisation in 2023 helped keep health and safety at the forefront of people’s minds and included the importance of reporting, escalation where necessary and follow-up. Local initiatives also took place. For example, a safety briefing including induction and training on first aid and evacuation procedures was organised to coincide with a move to a new office in Indonesia. Other local sessions included a focus on mental health.

We aim to increase the maturity of our health and safety ethos by embedding consciously safe working, designing and advising into our culture and employee behaviour. In the Netherlands, we achieved our target of maintaining level 3 certification on the Safety Culture Ladder in 2023 and are aiming to achieve level 4 in next year’s external audit. Our teams which operate in the rail sector are leading the way, having reached level 5 on the Safety Culture Ladder in 2023.

Our targets to prevent accidents were met in 2023 with no work-related fatalities and a lost time injury frequency of less than 0.10. During the year, 170 accident and incident reports were submitted (2022: 95). The increase is connected to more awareness of the need to report accidents and incidents. In 2023, we raised the awareness by addressing it in the Global Leadership Group meeting, running a full-year awareness campaign on Viva Engage for all employees, and discussing Health & Safety in Management Team meetings.
116 reports related to accidents and incidents involving employees (2022: 64) where 67 of these occurred at an office location, 26 at out-of-office locations and 23 were traffic related. In total 4 accidents resulting in at least one day off work were recorded in 2023 (2022: 1). 2 of these accidents were traffic related and 2 occurred at an out-of-office location.

The largest surge in reported accidents and incidents was observed in the Netherlands: 108 reports (2022: 57) with a notable increase in unsafe acts/situations (+23), office-related accidents and incidents (+15), non-work-related accidents and incidents (e.g., commuting, team events) (+10), out-of-office accidents and incidents (+3), and traffic-related accidents and incidents (+1). Additionally, there was an increase in reported accidents and incidents from the UK: 31 reports (2022: 19), particularly in office-related accidents and incidents (+8), unsafe acts/situations (+2), and traffic-related accidents and incidents (+2).

The Netherlands and UK, being the countries with the highest number of employees, were the focus of our year-round safety campaign, with the Netherlands already holding and aiming to maintain level 3 certification on the Safety Culture Ladder. Given that the majority of the reported accidents and incidents originate from these two countries and considering that the increase is mainly attributed to heightened awareness of reporting, especially concerning unsafe acts and office-related accidents and incidents, it suggests a growing consciousness regarding health and safety reporting.

We are committed to continuously improve our health and safety record. In 2023 we lowered our target for lost time injury frequency (LTIF) per 200,000 workable hours from 0.11 to 0.10. The LTIF figure for 2023 was just below this new target although, at 0.09 (2022: 0.02) is an increase on 2022. The rise in number of LTIs is due to some unfortunate tripping and falling incidents which happened both in traffic and in out-of-office locations. The risk of traffic-related incidents connected to business travel and tripping and falling incidents at out-of-office locations is proving hard to eliminate. Identifying and adopting risk reduction measures is therefore an important topic for travel and project health and safety risk assessments. LTIF is calculated with the total number of lost time injuries (resulting in at least one day of absence) in a certain time period, divided by the total number of hours worked in that period, and then multiplied by 200,000.

Total recordable case frequency (TRCF) per 200,000 workable hours during 2023 was 2.70. This increased compared to 2022 (1.55) and is also likely to relate to more awareness of reporting accidents, incidents, and unsafe situations/acts.