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Our business is built on the foundations of a great workforce and it’s essential that we look after and protect every member of the team. We have a number of wellbeing programmes in place and in order to achieve our outstanding safety record, we consistently nurture a culture of safety from the ground up.
Safety First
Our goal is to achieve zero accidents and incidents through proactive safety management and highly visible safety leadership. We have an internal safety team who work closely with all team members to help us deliver life’s essentials safely.
This ongoing focus means we will turn down business if it compromises our commitment to safety or sustainability.
As well as the initial training that’s delivered as part of our staff onboarding protocol, we provide constant and ongoing guidance and training development as they continue their career with us.
Technology also enables us to maintain our excellent track record, and every employee across the world has access to our online accident reporting system in which every incident, no matter how small, is reported and assessed. This, backed up with behavioural safety audits, means we have developed a culture of ‘safety first’ to protect our workers, other road users, and our customers.
Driver Training
Every one of our drivers goes through rigorous training before they get behind the wheel of a Suttons vehicle. We cover a wide range of scenarios and threats, from defensive driving through to legal compliance. We also look at working at heights, working in confined spaces, and the safe loading, unloading, and compression of products that they may come into contact with.
Knowledge & Skills
We place a great deal of importance on education, both for our employees and our customers.
Our team is constantly upskilling and acquiring the best practices to ensure our fleet of tanks are the most sophisticated and effective in the industry.
Not only do we acquire this knowledge, we also share it with our customers around the world.
We can offer you fleet specification training which explains construction in detail in order to help you understand the technologies and processes of our fleet, as well as the equipment we use.
In order to safely train our staff, customers, and third parties, we have constructed an interactive tank container at our Widnes depot. This allows us to safely let people walk inside and climb on top of the tank to teach them about the equipment.
This full-size tank container provides a hands-on safety training initiative which helps us further in our pursuit for safety excellence.
Emergency Response
We invest heavily in accident and incident prevention but they can, and do, happen so it’s essential we have a thorough and well-practiced emergency response.
We work closely with the Emergency Services, the Environmental Agency, other third-party partners such as vehicle recovery agents and conduct regular refresher training courses with our emergency response staff to ensure we are well-equipped to deal with any and all emergencies.
Our Three-Tier Reaction System is as follows:
Level 1 – A 24-hour telephone line which can be reached to provide a response to the emergency.
Level 2 – A direct telephone line to the manufacturer of the product.
Level 3 – Suttons will attend the incident and handle any problems accordingly using our emergency response vehicle.
Although it is very rarely required, our Level Three Emergency Response capability is ready to attend any incident at any time. Our emergency response teams are made up of fully-trained Suttons personnel and fully-equipped vehicles to react to any situation.
Suttons International operates a multilingual level one response system, with dedicated members for the US and China and a non-specific member for the rest of our international business.
Security
Each security measure that we undertake is done in compliance with European ADR regulations and every one of our tractor units is equipped with a sophisticated tracking device.
This enables us to locate any of our vehicles within seconds to provide you with regular updates on delivery. In the event that a vehicle deviates from its planned route, an alarm will notify our operators who will respond immediately.
As you’d imagine, we implement the very latest security systems on our sites and provide security awareness training to all of our employees. We are also mindful of threats posed by terrorism and, in order to protect our team and our customers, have received government briefings and delivered training including techniques to help us avoid vulnerable situations, especially for drivers entering areas which they are unfamiliar with.
Board Members of Responsible Care
Responsible Care is a global initiative which highlights the chemical industry’s commitment to improvements in health, safety, security, and environmental performance. In the UK, it covers the whole of the supply chain: from manufacturers right through to the distributors and logistics companies.
We are proud to work at the board level of the Technical Care Committee, which enables us to help influence standards that are used by logistical providers across the industry.
Working with the UK Home Office
We also work closely with the UK Home Office, who play a pivotal role in keeping the UK border safe and secure.
Most notably, we were commissioned by Border Force to manufacture a training tank for their staff. We created a design based on our own training tank but fitted it with false internal and external bulkheads to show how tanks can be modified to hide contraband coming across the border.
An improper repair was also carried out on the frame to teach Border Force Agents how to identify a frame that has been tampered with, while a false-bottomed syphon tube was installed and could be rotated to reveal a hidden compartment.