Powering Improvement Phase 3 2020-2025 Launch

A virtual event was held on Thursday 25th February 2021 to launch the new five-year phase of the UK Electricity Industry’s Powering Improvement health and safety initiative (2020-2025 and Beyond). The event saw Electricity supply, network and generating companies joined with trade unions (GMB, Prospect, Unison and Unite) and HSE to endorse the next 5 years of the programme and its aims. Powering Improvement’s last five-year phase was particularly successful across the sector, in which network companies saw accident and injury rates fall by nearly 25%. Since the programme began in 2010, those same rates have fallen by more than 50%. Across energy suppliers and energy generators as well the Powering Improvement programme
has helped build on the good progress made and continued the reductions in incidents and accidents.

This year, efforts remain concentrated on maintaining good health and wellbeing of staff across the industry. This is a high priority for companies as working days lost to sickness and ill health far exceed those from accidents. The focus over the next five years remains on making sure that all staff can return home safely. In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic introduced a number of additional direct and indirect risks to all industries, but Powering Improvement enabled collective and collaborative efforts across the sector to manage these issues. The commitment to safety and good health at work within the electricity industry will continue through the next phase of the Powering Improvement initiative, ensuring companies, trade unions and the regulators continually engage to ensure the impacts of health and safety risks are limited and that people within the sector can all go home engaged and healthier at the end of a productive day.