Blacklister’s award

A Balfour Beatty subsidiary has been presented with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accident’s (RoSPA) most prestigious award for safety.

RoSPA were apparently impressed by the way the “safety representatives were pulled into practical problem-solving activities” as well as the firm’s overall approach, “which was not to punish or to stigmatise but always to encourage behaviour change by entering into dialogue”.

Balfour Beatty was a major contributor to The Consulting Association, a murky organisation which had maintained a blacklist of union health and safety activists for almost 20 years until it was exposed in 2009.

Steve Kelly of the Blacklist Support Group said the firm had the worst record of sacking and blacklisting safety representatives in the industry and “to be praised for the way they treat their safety representatives is offensive”.