Employee health and safety
Our employees are entitled to a safe working environment and Thomas Cook Group takes responsibility for providing this very seriously.
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Employees taking part in e-learning courses
Our Board of Directors has a Health, Safety and Environmental Committee and we have a Group-wide Health and Safety Policy. As legal requirements vary from country to country, our Human Resource teams in the various business segments are responsible for managing the safety of our employees. They ensure legal requirements are met and training is provided as appropriate to local standards.
All our businesses work closely with local health and safety bodies. For example, Thomas Cook in Belgium meets monthly with the Committee for Prevention and Protection at Work (CPBW), comprising employer and employee representatives as well as the CPBW advisor. These meetings help to ensure that all working conditions are safe, emergency procedures are up to date and any accidents are investigated.
The locations our employees work in, including on our aeroplanes and in our holiday resorts, can present hazards and employees receive training on how to stay safe. As you would expect, safety training for our airline staff is of the utmost importance and we have comprehensive training programmes delivered by internal and external professionals including courses on emergency procedures, first aid and dangerous goods.
Across the Group, a wide range of initiatives is used to continually improve the safety of our employees. These include:
- A risk management programme for company car drivers, including licence checking and training
- An ongoing health surveillance programme for aircraft engineers
- Raising employee awareness of health and safety risks and precautions through e-learning packages and other media
- The continued development of retail health and safety management software enabling online access to our asbestos surveys for retail locations.
Our businesses continually improve the working environments for all our employees. Practices such as ergonomic desk assessments, evacuation exercises, first aid training, and hygiene reviews are commonplace.
Regrettably, despite rigorous training and safety measures, some accidents still happen. Our internal accident reporting is based on the RIDDOR criteria (Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations), requiring us to report work-related diseases, dangerous occurrences, major injuries and injuries resulting in three or more days being missed from work.
We are striving to achieve consistency in our employee accident reporting across our different businesses. We are not currently able to provide a full year-on-year comparison of all employee accidents, but January to September data is shown below.
Did you know?
In 2010, Thomas Cook Group had no employee fatalities and received no safety prosecutions, prohibition notices or improvement notices.
RIDDOR reportable incidents by business area (reporting period 1 January – 30 September 2010)
| Number of employees | RIDDOR employee accidents | Raids and robberies on stores | Total reportable incidents | Incidents as a proportion of employees | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total | 29,486 | 60 | 13 | 73 | 0.2% |
| UK | 14,262 | 36 | 11 | 47 | 0.3% |
| Northern Europe | 3,198 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0% |
| Central Europe | 4,239 | 12 | 0 | 12 | 0.3% |
| West & East Europe | 3,725 | 10 | 2 | 12 | 0.3% |
| North America | 1,030 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0% |
| India | 2,584 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0.1% |
| Egypt | 448 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0% |
A recent increase in robberies and attempted robberies at retail travel stores in the UK is of great concern, and we have introduced closer monitoring and reporting of such incidents at Group level. We have robust processes in place to investigate each incident and to implement additional measures to further improve security. We also inform our competitors of incidents that have occurred, enabling their teams to be more vigilant to possible attacks.
We are pleased to be able to say that Thomas Cook Group had no fatalities among its employees, nor have we received any safety prosecutions, prohibition notices or improvement notices in 2010.