Being Safe at Heart

Safe at Heart brings together our framework for health and safety at HS2. It is a guiding philosophy and a practical approach that allows everyone to feel personally connected to our actions and behaviours on health, safety and wellbeing. It is designed to make sure we do everything we can to keep everyone safe and well – and leave a legacy for future projects.

Safe at Heart, together with strong leadership, an inclusive culture and robust performance measures allow us to achieve our strategic goals on health and safety.

Safe at Heart crystallises how we behave and act across the HS2 programme and includes health, safety and wellbeing.

We use Safe at Heart as a project-wide brand and on-going campaign, covering HS2 Ltd, our network of contractors and suppliers and our work in local communities to keep health and safety at the forefront of everyone’s minds.

Our Safe at Heart philosophy is distilled into three distinct pillars: ‘I care. You count. We matter.’ Each of the pillars makes it clear to everyone working on HS2 that they are accountable.

Why we’re Safe at Heart

Safety is one of our core values and it’s the starting point for everything we do: if people aren’t safe, or don’t feel safe, we cannot fulfil the complex task of building HS2, meet our strategic goals and deliver the transformational benefits of the railway.

It’s for this reason that health and safety underpins everything we do. It’s also why everyone working on HS2 is empowered to speak up and step in if they think something is unsafe.

Our overarching commitment to health and safety is brought together in our project-wide philosophy of Safe at Heart. We launched Safe at Heart in 2015/16 as a framework of risk focus areas and commitments.

Our health and safety focus areas and commitments are integral to our overarching, programme-wide ethos and approach, called Safe at Heart.

Year-on-year, through our new health and safety operational plan, we will hold ourselves to account in delivering our Safe at Heart commitments against our seven risk focus areas.

Day-by-day, we will demonstrate we care as individuals, that the decisions we make in our teams count and that our collective endeavours matter to the legacy we’ll leave with Britain’s new rail network.

Why everyone is involved

Evidence from past projects shows us that exceptional health, safety and wellbeing helps to drive exceptional business performance. This means our approach to health, safety and wellbeing is fundamental to achieving our mission: to build the best railway, in the best way.

The choices we make as individuals, team leaders and collectively with our partners are crucial to completing our mission successfully and meeting the challenge of raising standards. 

• Individuals – ‘I care’: ‘I care’ relates to our individual accountability for occupational health and wellbeing as well as safety. Caring for ourselves, our colleagues and everyone we impact is the foundation of a thriving health, safety and wellbeing culture.
• Teams and organisations – ‘You count’: ‘You count’ relates to our team and organisational accountability for managing risk and preventing occupational ill health and injury. It’s about empowering teams to make safe decisions and take safe actions so they are actively contributing to a step-change in health, safety and wellbeing across HS2.
• Collectively – ‘We matter’: ‘We matter’ is about the collective power we have as a future-focused leader to leave a history-making legacy for our industry. Through our commitment to doing things differently and sharing learning, innovation and best practice we aim to reset industry benchmarks for health, safety and wellbeing.

Applying our Safe at Heart approach to everything we do – and living our value of safety – allows us to focus on keeping each other safe and well and achieving our strategic goal of setting new standards for health, safety and security for the construction and operation of the railway.