Lanes receives RoSPA Gold Medal Award

Drainage specialist Lanes Group plc has received the company’s RoSPA Gold Medal certificate for 2018.

The presentation was made by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents Awards to mark Lanes’ achievement of the RoSPA Gold Award for the ninth consecutive year.

Group Health, Safety, Quality, and Environment Manager Paul McParland received the certificate from RoSPA Trustee Don Lloyd during a ceremony at the Metropole Hotel in Birmingham.

He said: “Setting ourselves the goal of achieving RoSPA Gold is a key benchmark for us. It helps us test our systems and processes against highly robust and relevant criteria.

“A very important element of the judging process is evidence of continuous improvement. There can be no resting on laurels, and that is certainly the discipline we set ourselves at Lanes.”

The company, the UK’s largest independent drainage specialist, could point to a series of initiatives during 2017 that demonstrated a relentless desire to improve health and safety performance.

This included an innovative wellbeing app and practitioner programme at Lanes Utilities, the wastewater network services maintenance provider for Thames Water.

Under the initiative, an operational management app monitors the happiness of operational colleagues and offers practical support via a qualified wellbeing and mental health practitioner.

Across the national depot network a safe driving campaign used a vehicle tracking system to significantly reduce speeding and in addition a lone worker monitoring system to improve the safety of lone workers especially out of hours.

Since the Gold Medal certificate was awarded, Lanes Group has also achieved three international standards – ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001:2015, and OHSAS 18001:2007.

It is the first time the company has held all three standards – for business quality, environmental management, and occupational health and safety – across all its depot network and utility hub operations.

Paul McParland said: “High health and safety standards are critical to our business success. We’re continuously setting ourselves new challenges, and the RoSPA Awards help make sure we meet them.”