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Reporting performance

The facts

The law requires that arrangements for managing occupational safety and health risks are monitored and reviewed; however there is no requirement for an organisation to include occupational safety and health in their published reports.
Many organisations report internally on occupational safety and health, for example, producing statistics on accidents, incidents and ill health, but do not include it in their annual reports.
Enhanced, external occupational safety and health performance reporting is considered to be good practice, and helps demonstrate commitment to continual improvement and transparency to stakeholders.
In 2000, the government challenged the UK’s top 350 businesses to publicly report on occupational safety and health performance to a common standard by 2002 and all organisations with more than 250 employees by 2004.
Research studies ^{1 &
2} found considerable scope for improvement in levels of occupational safety and health reporting in large UK companies and public bodies, particularly on performance and targets.
In 2010 the UK Government committed to reinstating an operating and financial review (OFR) and exploring further ways to improve corporate accountability and transparency.

Our position

We advocate the inclusion of occupational safety and health performance data in internal and public annual reports, as a driver to improved performance and recommend organisations adopt a holistic approach to the management of business risk.
For annual reports, data should be gathered covering all work activities, direct employees, other employees/contractors and members of the public.
As a minimum, annual reports should include annual outcome data (accidents and ill health, lost time and incidents), analysis against targets, and the coming year’s priorities (continual improvement programme).
Organisations should aspire to more detailed reporting – using a ‘balanced-scorecard’ approach and best practice public reporting standards, including those for corporate social responsibility (CSR).
We have called for expanded directors’ reporting and a statutory OFR and reporting standard; auditors review; guidance on occupational safety and health key performance indicators; and shareholders advisory vote.
We recommend OFR reporting standards should apply to “quoted” companies and also “non-quoted” large (and eventually) medium-sized enterprises.
We would like to see the occupational safety and health content of sustainability and socially responsible investment indices appropriately strengthened.
We believe performance information needs to be easy to access and meaningful, providing quality and comparability.
We also advocate use of the free on-line tools CHaSPI (Corporate Health and Safety Performance Index) and HaSPI (Health and Safety Performance Indicator, for SMEs), to help benchmark and track performance.
We would like to see more external verification of occupational safety and health performance data and also for the CHaSPI tool to reflect key directors’ occupational safety and health duties.