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Balfour Beatty, Health And Safety And The Heathrow Tunnel

Balfour Beatty was prosecuted in connection with the tunnel collapse and pleaded guilty to charges brought under Sections 2(1) and 3(1) of the Health & Safety at Work Act (1974). In consequence, the company was fined £1.2 million following the high court decision on 15 February 1999. From the outset, the company worked closely, openly and fully with the Health & Safety Executive to determine what went wrong and why.

At the time of the incident, the company’s safety performance was on a steadily improving trend. In the period since the event, the group’s safety performance has improved by more than 40%. In 2000, the company has achieved a reduction of more than 20% in its insurance premiums as a direct result of this improvement. Twenty thousand man-days of safety training are organised each year within the group.

In 1999, the company’s work on the most complex sector of the Jubilee Line was awarded the British Safety Council’s Sword of Honour, one of many such awards in recent years. In two major businesses acquired from the public sector in the period since 1994, the application of Balfour Beatty’s safety management systems have substantially improved the acquired companies’ safety performance. This year, our Major Projects business has won the RoSPA Gold Award for achieving three successive years of substantial improvement in occupational safety performance. We believe that our systems and performance compare very favourably with the industry as a whole.

Balfour Beatty has always taken its responsibility for the health and safety of its employees and all members of the public very seriously. However, the Heathrow incident served to increase the company’s focus upon the subject and triggered a comprehensive review of health, safety and engineering management in the group.

This review had a number of important outcomes. The company conducted its own, thorough, internal investigation to identify the causes of the incident, which led to the production of an extensive internal management report and to the development of a programme of action in response to the lessons learned. This programme had four main elements:-

- the immediate specific application of the key lessons learned from the collapse to other relevant Balfour Beatty projects and businesses within the group

- a substantial programme of internal briefings, conducted by the company’s directors, to ensure the organisation as a whole responded to the lessons learned

- the development of an upgraded, detailed risk management structure for the group as a whole

- a group-wide review of health and safety management and engineering control procedures.

Immediately following the incident, senior managers from Balfour Beatty and its client, BAA, established a joint solutions team to determine a rescue and reconstruction plan for the Heathrow Express project. At all times, the company’s focus was entirely on successful completion of the project, irrespective of the commercial, contractual or financial implications. The project was completed successfully and the recovery plan has won high praise from many informed quarters and a number of engineering and other awards.

Since 1994, Balfour Beatty’s already strong reputation as a world leader in infrastructure engineering has been further strengthened by a series of engineering successes. We have completed, in joint venture, the largest and most complex contract on the Jubilee Line between Green Park and Waterloo. We have completed, also in joint venture, the terminal building at Chek Lap Kok Airport in Hong Kong. We have successfully built the complex Cardiff Bay Barrage, which involved the creation of a coffer dam large enough to contain Cardiff Arms Park Stadium twice over. We are currently retrofitting the Golden Gate Bridge in California against earthquake damage, and working on two major tunnelling contracts under the Swiss Alps, amongst many other significant engineering projects.

We are currently working successfully with a wide range of clients, including Railtrack, SBB-Swiss Railways, the Highways Agency, the Kowloon-Canton Railway Corporation, Caltrans and Amtrak amongst many others.

ENDS

Enquiries to:-

Tim Sharp
Balfour Beatty plc
Tel: +44 (0)20 7629 6622