In Linxon, we look after the wellbeing, health and working conditions of each individual. Protecting our work teams is essential as we seek to sustain a reliable and prosperous work environment in addition to seeking their highest physical, mental and social state. For this reason, we promote a culture of safety at all levels by implementing measures for the prevention and control of labour diseases and accidents.
Our Shurton site has now achieved a year of continuous Perfect Days on site, a Perfect Day is any day when no safety injury, security event or environmental release has occurred. Perfect Days allow us to recognise the efforts that our teams put into ensuring that people and our environment remain unharmed and the main reason why this has been achieved is because of the consistent focus from the Shurton team on maintaining high Quality and Sustainable standards on site.
As a quick reminder, the Shurton site is Linxon’s longest continuous operational site, so this currently makes it Linxon’s highest Perfect Day score globally.
Some of the Shurton Linxon site management team. From left to right: John Best,
Tony O’Brien, Rob Warfield, Colin Flynn and Stuart Stevens.
“Congratulations and thanks to all the Shurton team and operatives for giving a new benchmark for the Linxon safety culture”, said Frédéric Tréfois, CEO of Linxon. “It has been great to see all the ideas for improvements that have been put in place throughout the year. This has been a real team exercise from a complete project delivery perspective, driven by our Linxon employees but also involving our subcontractors and customer listening and implementing all the identified improvements actions”, he added.
The Shurton Substation project is part of our clients (National Grid’s) connection project to the Hinkley Point C Nuclear Build. National Grid is connecting the new Nuclear Power Station to the existing electrical capacity in South West England. The project includes upgrading the existing infrastructure by removing 65 kilometres (40 miles) of existing 132,000-volt overhead line and replacing it by building 46.6 kilometres (29 miles) of 400,000-volt overhead lines. As such they are working with Linxon and 5 other major contractors (including our competitors) to provide up to 8% of the UK electrical supply from this project.
A continuous effort
During last year’s CEO visit to Shurton, Ian Cartwright, Director of Capital Delivery at National Grid, took the opportunity to congratulate the Linxon and National Grid teams on site, including the head office and our civil contractors (H&A). He said that the Shurton project is spoken about in positive terms for the hard work and good team working relationships both internally in Linxon and with National Grid.
National Grid also recognised Linxon’s HSE focus by presenting their 2019 HSE Contractor Award to the Linxon Assistant Site Manager, Sadina “Sid” Keogh for her work on the Shurton wellbeing garden.
In 2020, we achieved a 100% Achilles audit score at Shurton and the UK headquarters office. Achilles audits are an external audit industry pre-qualification verification system used by the utilities sector in the UK to manage risk within the supply chain and comply with EU regulations.
The results obtained at the Shurton site motivate us to continue HSE improvements including to our safety culture, where the most important thing is that all our workers return home safe and sound.