The Environment Agency 
The Environment Agency is the
leading public body responsible for protecting and improving the environment in England
and Wales. It was set up by the 1995 Environment Act and, as a non-departmental public
body, it is sponsored largely by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs
(DEFRA) and the National Assembly for Wales (NAW).
For several years now The Environment Agency has been conducting detailed organisation-wide Health and Safety audits. They have a large number of sites and were looking for a software solution to manage these audits. After extensive research, CHASE was chosen as the package that most suited their needs. The Environment Agency had already developed a detailed set of audit questions and standards based on their Safety Management System and this was entered into the CHASE system. The inherent flexibility of the software allowed this to be carried out very easily.
The Environment Agency approach was to train teams of in-house
auditors to conduct the annual audits. The teams comprise managers, team leaders, team
members and safety representatives. All are trained on a two day course which was
developed. HASTAM’s Managing Director has now delivered over twenty of these courses
in a four year period.
The Tag facility of CHASE made it possible for for the Environment Agency to use a common set of audit questions to be used at all levels, with auditors and managers at different levels seeing and answering only those questions relevant to them. At a higher level, these responses are combined to create performance measurements at Area and Regional levels and ultimately for the Environment Agency as a whole. These, combined with the recommendations made during the audits, are fed back to the managers and are used to create action plans to drive continual improvements in health and safety performance at all levels.
Over the years, HASTAM has worked with the Environment Agency on a number of training initiatives. The first, and most widespread, was the delivery of a tailored version of the IOSH Managing Safely. Since 1997, over 90 Managing Safely courses have been run by HASTAM. They provided a key to improving management awareness of health and safety issues across the organisation.
HASTAM continues to run a range of courses designed specifically for the Agency, covering risk assessment and incident investigation.
