CJ Awards 2009: Silver Helmet Award for Safety

This year the Silver Helmet award stimulated lengthy debate. After much discussion the judges gave the prestigious award to specialist housing firm United House, with SGB receiving a deserved high commendation for its initiative to raise safety performance across the industry.

United House impressed the judges with its consistent approach to raising health and safety awareness. A strong safety culture pervades its own organisation and has changed the habits of subcontractors where attitudes are being transformed.

The judges said: "United House is not afraid to set challenging health and safety targets and communicates this very well at site-level."

They commended the way United had introduced and run its ACTIVE safety campaign, describing the approach as a credit to the organisation.

Strong individual leadership, with full support, from the board has brought measurable behavioural changes across United's sites.

In the first seven months, the ACTIVE campaign saw accident frequency rates, which include subcontractors, fall from 0.67 down to 0.49.

United strives to continuously improve and recently introduced ACTIVE Hazard Report cards, developed to allow anonymous comments from workers on site in the spirit of ensuring an unrestricted flow of information.