Social Responsibility

Health & Safety

Tate & Lyle has no higher priority than safety, which we believe is fundamental to running a successful business. This means ensuring safe and healthy conditions for everyone at our sites: employees, contractors and visitors. By reporting, recognising and rewarding safety performance, we aim to ensure that all our operations focus on continuous improvement.

Overview
Our employee safety performance showed good improvement in 2007, with progress in all areas. However, while employees' efforts have paid off, we were disappointed that our contractors' safety results were down on a particularly good previous year.

Employee safety results for calendar year 2007
The Group Safety Index compares safety performance across Tate & Lyle. This is a weighted average of injuries sustained at the work place, with more severe incidents having greater impact. The smaller the index, the better the performance. Our target is zero for every Tate & Lyle operation.

Most locations equalled or improved on their 2006 performance, including 15 that reported no lost-time accidents and ten that reported no recordable injuries for the year. We were pleased that our overall results returned to the pattern of improvement we had seen in previous years, with all our measures showing better performance compared with calendar year 2006 results.

■ Group safety index (weighted average of injuries sustained in the workplace across Tate & Lyle, with more severe incidents having greater impact) improved by 13.7%.

■ Recordable injury rate (injury requiring treatment beyond first aid) improved by 19.7%.

■ Lost-time accident rate (recordable injury sufficiently severe to result in lost work days or to restrict the employee's ability to perform his/her job) improved by 13.5%.

■ Severity rate (number of work days lost due to injuries per 200,000 employee hours) improved by 13.1%.

Benchmarking results
The USA and Europe compile safety statistics differently and therefore comparisons are difficult. However, we can compare the performance of each of our divisions with results from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The most recent results available from the Bureau are from 2006, with the exception of the US corn refiners, whose results are from 2007. Again this year, our divisions are outperforming the average reported standard for their peers in their respective sectors and in the US private sector as a whole. 

Our lockout-tagout system helps ensure
the safety of everyone working on a piece
of equipment

Managing safety
Maintaining a consistently safe and healthy workplace for our people requires effective, proactive management. We operate network safety committees in the Americas and Europe that share knowledge and experience between plants with the aim of ensuring consistently high standards of safety across Tate & Lyle. The core elements of our approach to safety are:

■ emphasis on the importance of behaviour by encouraging a culture of safety at all locations;

■ improving communications and sharing best practice throughout the Group;

■ the auditing of safety and loss control programmes; and

■ the active involvement of senior executives in auditing and promoting safety.

Projects and activities
Our network safety committees have worked on a number of programmes this year, including:

■ establishing a technical framework for applying Tate & Lyle's safety and safety engineering standards globally;

■ conducting behavioural audits across the Group; and

■ recognising and encouraging contractor safety performance through contractor safety committees and award schemes.