Melton Borough Council

Melton Borough Council is a rural local authority in Leicestershire that provides services and support to the local town, wider community and businesses. Some of these services require Council employees to work alone, occasionally in circumstances that can be challenging and may pose a threat to personal safety. 

Review Existing Procedures

When Jo Lees joined as Health and Safety Advisor in 2021, she started to familiarise herself with existing procedures including lone working and led on a corporate review and refresh of the council’s health and safety manual and operating procures, including for lone working.    

Personal safety devices were available to some of the Council’s lone working employees but were not necessarily embedded as a corporate tool to support and mitigate lone working risks.  As a result, deployment of the devices was not coordinated and not all devices were being used regularly or correctly. It became apparent from conversations with staff that safety technology was only one component of a much broader piece of work for lone workers, but that technology did have a role to protect staff and should be deployed in a coordinated way to enhance safety and assurance.

In her health and safety leadership role, Jo was keen to ensure that the solution to safer lone working was not about just having electronic lone working devices, it was about consulting with each service area to identify how they operated, why they did or did not use them or have access to a lone working device and then risk assessing their lone working operations and their needs.   

Improved Strategy    

Melton Borough Council has fully refreshed its health and safety arrangements, through which it has embedded a new and improved lone working safety strategy that has its foundations in employee consultation, education and collaboration. 

Jo runs Lone Working workshops and bespoke sessions for service areas, where discussion and sharing experiences is encouraged amongst the employees, helping to get staff buy-in and engagement with this process, therefore helping to build more robust workable procedures.

The Council has an Employee Protection Register which enables a proactive approach to risk management, alongside other lone working controls and safety measures such as:

• ensuring Outlook calendars are populated with current information,
• ‘buddy systems’ set up along with team messaging groups,
• team sign in and out boards are used where appropriate, and
• escalation contact cards placed in prominent places at home following family conversations around what should happen if a council employee failed to return home at the end of a working day. 

In addition, Jo had worked with the Suzy Lamplugh Trust in a previous role and workshops have now been run at Melton. “Reporting accidents, incidents and near misses of any kind is mandatory, so we have a much more accurate picture of how we can continue to improve personal safety standards”. 

“The Peoplesafe MySOS devices are a key part of this ongoing safety strategy,” says Jo “Our key objective over the past three years has been to refine internal process, and making them more robust, for reporting, monitoring and supporting staff. We want our people to be sufficiently ‘armed’ with the information, strategies and support to keep them safe.