Tarmac has won a raft of awards and commendations for outstanding achievements in building safe working environments for its employees, customers, and the communities which it serves at the Mineral Products Association (MPA) and British Precast Health and Safety Awards.
The UK’s leading sustainable construction materials company won the Safer Through Improvements in Health & Wellbeing award for creating an occupational health and wellbeing learning centre at the company’s National Skills and Safety Park in Nottinghamshire.
And this was followed by winning the Safer Together award for its Professional Operator Development Programme (PODP).
Underpinning this year’s MPA Awards – which acknowledge outstanding safety practice across the minerals industry over the past 12 months – is the theme ‘Safer by Sharing…Safer by Action’.
The awards this year also focused on the Fatal 6 which, as the name suggests, covers the six most critical hazards facing producers throughout the minerals industry.
Carl Platt, chairman of the MPA Health & Safety Committee, said: “We want to mitigate these high-consequence hazards as an industry, as companies and as an association.
“My key objective is to promote Vision Zero and I want us to work together to make our industry desirable, safe and world class.”
Andy Shuttlewood, Tarmac’s health, safety, environment & quality director, said: “We are delighted to be recognised by the Mineral Products Association and British Precast for our measures to ensure the safety and wellbeing of everyone on site and in the community.
“Our people are our most important asset and, because of this, we go to great lengths to ensure a very hands-on approach to learning. The space we created at The Park brings alive the awareness of the occupational hazards that our people will encounter while working on our sites.”
Heather Ankers, Tarmac’s PODP training manager, added: “The PODP course encompasses all of the knowledge and behaviours needed to become a skilled operative within our business. We look at the technical and practical aspects of the role blended with classroom-based learning that they can take back to their own sites. It’s not just showing them how to do something but also why they do it and getting them to think about making safe and better decisions.
“Since launching the PODP in 2018, we have enrolled around 150 apprentices on the programme. So far, 70 of those have completed with around 40 of them gaining distinctions which means they have achieved 100% on their end-point assessment.”
Tarmac won further commendations for a Vehicle and Pedestrian Management Project (VPMP) at its Newark Building Products plant. The business also received a further two certificates of merit in the Safer Production category – for a remote-control material hopper feed and for the company’s system for maintaining and operating safety related controls.
Oliver Kibble, a shift supervisor at Whitwell Quarry, was runner-up in the Young Leader category.
Picture: The first cohort of Tarmac employees on the Professional Operator Development Programme are shown around the company’s National Skills and Safety Park in Nottinghamshire when the training course was launched in 2018.
