Phillips 66 has been awarded the RoSPA Gold Award for Occupational Health and Safety for the third time, and was also presented with its third Gold Award for the Management of Occupational Road Risk (MORR) at the RoSPA awards ceremony.

The awards are open to businesses and organisations of all types and sizes from across the UK and overseas, and the judging panel considers entrants’ overarching occupational health and safety management systems, including practices such as leadership and workforce involvement.

The RoSPA award win comes on the back of a number of other recent safety performance achievements for Phillips 66 including completing 5,000 days without an employee injury and 1,000 days without a contractor injury.

In late 2013, Phillips 66 established a new Cross Contractor industry initiative with its haulage contractors when new contracts had been awarded. Phillips 66 works closely with its contractors, encouraging them to collaborate with their competitors, share contractual best practice and safety knowledge and deliver road safety innovation. The overall aim of the collaborative initiative was to reduce road accidents to below 0.9 per 1 million km travelled.

From the early quarterly Cross Contractor safety meetings, two key areas were identified to help deliver safety improvements. These were Slow Speed Manoeuvring (SSM) Elimination – addressing the potential risks associated when loaded tankers manoeuvre onto or off a filling station even at very low speeds – and Human Factors – addressing the potential risks associated with employees making mistakes by not following procedures or putting training into action.

Phillips 66 has since worked closely with its hauliers to develop two initiatives to address these areas and 20 different actions are now in various stages of completion. Actions include additional classroom and practical training, unannounced safety observations of drivers, the use of ‘sacrificial’ cones at vulnerable points around tankers when manoeuvring, forward-facing video cameras and a GOAL (Get Out And Look) initiative whereby contractors’ drivers are encouraged to inspect manoeuvring areas at ground level rather than from the tanker cab.

The results has been significant improvements in slow speed manoeuvring incidents and general road safety during 2014. Statistical analysis shows that in 2014 Phillips 66 tankers undertook 84,850 journeys, with a total journey distance of 8.346 million km. There was one road accident in 2014 where the Phillips 66 haulier was judged to be at fault. A review of Slow Speed Manoeuvring (SSM) incidents shows a significant reduction in reported cases. SSM occurrences within the confines of a site, terminal or parking area have decreased from 13 reports in 2013, to seven in 2014 – an all-time low.

Russell Best, HSE Advisor at Phillips 66, commented: “As a growing energy manufacturing company delivering 1.6 billion litres of fuel annually, safety flows through our entire operation and is one of our core values. Our goal is to achieve a zero incident safety record. Our Cross Contractor initiative – and the various activities that have stemmed from it – has been a resounding success and is something that we are all committed to continuing. We believe this is the only such Cross Contractor example in the industry and everyone involved is reaping the benefits from this collaborative approach.”

Phillips 66 is now working on future safety performance plans, which include developing a ‘Perfect Delivery’ training film, introducing a ‘Driver Tiredness’ presentation, applying rear advisory signage to the rear of tanker barrels and undertaking a review of all 2015 risk assessments.