The health, safety and wellbeing of our employees is paramount. At Pennon, we believe everyone who works for us and with us should go home safe to their families and loved ones every day, and this has never had more resonance than in the current climate. We worked hard to support employees physically and emotionally during the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic and have continued to evolve how we can improve both the physical and emotional health of all of our people.
Our Pennon Code of Conduct ensures all employees have the same understanding of what is expected in the workplace. It is fully aligned to HomeSafe, our health and safety programme, to ensure employees get to work safely, enjoy a safe and healthy working environment and arrive home without incident at the end of the working day.
HomeSafe
Ensuring our people go home safe to their families safely every day is an utmost priority. Our HomeSafe programme continues to focus on the three key areas of Visible Safety Leadership, Accountability and Data Driven Targeted Interventions. Relentless focus on and driving consistency in these areas has seen the Group’s Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (employees and agency, excluding contractors), the Group’s primary measure of health and safety performance, continue to reduce, and this year achieve the original HomeSafe strategic target of 0.25. This year has seen the fourth year in a row of reduction in LTIFR, down to 0.22 in September 2024, and 0.24 at 31 March 2025, compared to 0.30 at 31 March 2024.
The three areas we focused on:
Visible Safety Leadership:
- The third year of HomeSafe Live events
- Six conferences across Devon, Cornwall, Bournemouth and Bristol, sponsored by the Senior Management Team from all departments. Over 1,000 employees attended fun, engaging sessions focused on the “Mind Safety” principles connecting day to day behaviours to safety outcomes.
- Leaders owning HomeSafe, celebrating success with the intention of encouraging others to develop good practice and behaviours.
- Leaders hosted safety ‘stand-downs’ to discuss recent events and immediate lessons to be adopted.
- An expansion of the successful ‘12 days of Christmas’ campaign into a full 24 day advent calendar where each day for 24 days, a team from across all Group companies and supply chain partners owned a key HomeSafe message for the Group ranging from simple pictures and messages through to scripted and acted out videos to engage the audience.
Driving a culture of accountability throughout the organisation:
- Implementing an index HomeSafe scorecard with a 70% performance bias on lead activities, driving up performance against these areas and embedding these behaviours as the ‘way we work’.
- Empowered decision making on risk management and investment into the front line teams to identify hazards and solutions, and deliver these locally at pace to improve the working environment.
Used analytics to target interventions on the key areas at the right time to drive down harm, particularly in manual handling and slips, trips and falls. Additionally, this year we have driven increased focus on our ‘Site Pride’ initiative, encouraging teams across the Group, including Tier 1 and 2 contractors, to meet the minimum standards of their workplaces to achieve a Bronze, Silver or Gold Site Pride award. Through a league table approach we have introduced healthy ‘competition’ between teams to drive up standards in their work environment, instilling local pride and creating and maintaining clean, healthy and safe work environments that will ultimately lead to higher engagement and fewer injuries. 45 individual sites have achieved an award to date with a similar number in flight and due to be assessed in the coming year. As we prepare for AMP8, HomeSafe has also been embedded within Amplify, our engineering partnership between SWW and our supply chain, leveraging the skills, experiences and innovation opportunities from across a wide range of organisations.
While we have delivered year-on-year improvements, we continue to recognise that HomeSafe is not a project that will be completed. It continues to be the way we work and how we deliver on our commitments to customers, communities and the environment. Our roadmap to HomeSafe 2025 has delivered its original objective. HomeSafe is truly embedded within the Group, and to build on this success we have evolved HomeSafe again, focusing on four key cornerstones that will drive continued improvements in Occupational Safety while increasing focus and improvements in health and wellbeing. The plan to 2030 has been developed with significant input from across the whole Group and will see HomeSafe remain at the core of how we deliver for our customers, stakeholders and the environment, expanding the remit to ensure we support our people to be the best version of themselves and that everyone goes home safe every day.
Read more on our Health and Safety metrics, including LTI, LTIFR, training and Wellbeing in our ESG Databook.
