Posted By Robert. ROSPA and BSC, to name a couple, offer safety awards at a cost. Are they really worth anything? Do they carry any commercial value? Could they be regarded as (self?)recognition of achievement. Are there others who offer Safety Awards?

Posted By Peter MacDonald I'm wary of these schemes but there is no doubt that they are of commercial / marketing value. There is however, in my experience, the deliberate non reporting of accidents being used to manipulate stats in order for the award to be made. Wether the awarding body turns a blind eye to this or does not pick it up through lack of robust auditing I do not know. But be very sure though, that it's a fact that there are companies out there with Swords of Honour, and Badges of Distinction (or whatever)that are blatantly lying to get these awards. So as a tool to differentiate the good from the bad they are certainly suspect, although they will get your foot in the door of most prequalifications. Pete

Posted By Stephen D. Clarke Speaking from experience of the RoSPA H&S awards I think overall they don't do any harm and can do a lot of good. Admittedly this was several years ago with a large multinational manufacturing company but each site applied for the RoSPA award and progessively attained different levels. The main benefit as I see it is in raising the profile of H&S for directors/senior managers and the workforce, keeping it in the spotlight and ensuring that a H&S management system is in place.

Posted By Alexander Falconer I am really surprised to hear of Peter's comments about companies blatantly lying about or even manipulating their accident statistics in order to achieve an award of some kind. As one who has achieved and received many HSE awards over the years, whilst I certainly agree these awards can be used for commercial/marketing purposes, they can also be utilised to benchmark yourself agaist your competitors and vice versa. Whilst there are no formal site audits conducted for both RoSPA & BSC "ordinary" awards, a company's management commitment towards H&S can often be assessed in a satisfactory manner just from the supporting documentation/evidence which is supplied by such companies from the effort they put into their submissions for these awards. Most of the major awards (Sword of honours, Sir George Earl Trophy, MoRR award, Astor Tropy, ViBES awards, BCE awards, etc, etc) very often require a site visit of some form, usually by a panel of judges or auditors. These visits are usually quite stringent, and winners can basically be confident in stating they are one of the best, if not the best within their sectors. I can confidently state in all my submissions, there has been no manipulation of any figures, those who do so are only kidding themselves, otherwise how do we practitioners learn from mistakes made!

Posted By Allan St.John Holt I think the ones where you only have to beat the industry average accident figure are not worth having - but the more sophisticated ones certainly are. There's a big PR element in safety as we all know, so getting some coverage is a good thing. There is certainly a lot of work involved in putting a submission together with the evidence, so it's not a gesture. However, it can be embarrassing (as RoSPA (I think) found out one year some time ago) when a winner yet to be announced was all over the papers because they had just had a fatality in their works. Question - whether to take the award away - or not make it in this case - or to use the opportunity to point out that even organisations with relatively low risk work can fall from grace. Low risk doesn't mean no risk! As I recall the award was not made. Allan

Posted By John McFeely After viewing this thread I'm surprised that some people are surprised that under reporting and manipulation of figures are a fact of life for many businesses. I tend to agree with those comments which point towards PR. I don’t necessarily think, however, that Organisations that hand out these awards for monetary gain are as lacking in honesty or credibility as those Companies that strive to be recognised for Health and Safety at any cost, simply to advertise themselves as caring and safety conscious entities. Money might talk, however the accident statistics are sometimes hard to listen to.