By Sarah Walker
Stiller Warehousing and Distribution have once again proven they are shining stars when it comes to putting the health and safety of all staff first, by achieving the gold award from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA).
Last year, in their first year of applying for the internationally recognised industry award, which highlights those organisations who lead the way when it comes to their health and safety procedures, Stiller achieved RoSPA’s coveted silver status.
At the time, Darren Holliday, health and safety manager, said the firm would not rest on its laurels and would be going for gold in 2023.
And they have kept to their word, achieving the RoSPA’s gold standard for both their overall business and in the Transport
Fleet category.
Brian Simpson, operations director at Stiller, which has 400,000 sq ft of warehousing and is based on Aycliffe Business Park, said the award was great recognition for the hard work Stiller puts into health and safety at work.
As an example, the company commits 2,000 hours each year to health and safety training.
The firm also has nine driver trainers on site, carrying out driving assessments on each of Stiller’s drivers every year.
These trainers also reassess any driver involved in an accident or incident to ensure they are fit for the role.
“We put a lot of time and effort into safety and we don’t find any accident within the business acceptable,” says Brian.
“Health and safety is at the forefront of everything we do and it’s embedded in every process within the business.’’
“Achieving the RoSPA gold standard shows that the effort and systems that we have built are gold standard and it’s great to get an industry-recognised award such as this.”
Brian explains that applying for the award is a painstaking process.
Achieving the award is not just based on theory around health and safety, it is concerned with the actual systems and procedures an organisation has in place.
The application process is extremely in-depth and includes providing a lot of documentation outlining all of an organisation’s processes around health and safety.
This is then reviewed by a health and safety expert.
RoSPA also looks at an organisation’s accident statistics and what an organisation is putting in place to reduce accidents overall.
“The award body wants to see examples of our health and safety management rather than just a policy – and everything we have sent them has been viewed as being of a very high standard,” Brian said.
“Warehousing and road transport is quite a high-risk industry, where there are a lot of people involved, a lot of drivers and vehicles travelling all over the country so our employees are not always on site where we can view them.
“Therefore, the systems that we have need to be robust enough to deal with that.
“For that reason, it’s exceptionally pleasing that in our second year of applying for the RoSPA award we have achieved the gold standard for our overall business as well as for the transport fleet category, which is integral to what we do.”
Brian said the RoSPA award was great recognition for all employees at Stiller, who work hard to keep health and safety uppermost in their minds in everything that they do, as something that is embedded in the culture of the organisation.
“Every single employee has played a part in enabling us to achieve this award and we are extremely grateful for their efforts.”
Find out more about Stiller at stiller.co.uk.