Legislation

How Thames Water’s Health and Safety Legal Update newsletter simplifies legislation for employees

Safety & Health Practitioner

Gary Crisp, Health and Safety Risk and Policy Manager at Thames Water, explains how the company produces regular legal briefing that filters all the various legal changes over a period and extracts the relevant changes for the business, before turning it into normal language people can understand.

“Keeping everyone who works for and on behalf of Thames Water abreast of the latest legislative changes is vital. However the ever changing world of law and court cases that arise can be challenging to keep up with. At Thames, we help our people through producing a legal newsletter that is relevant, up-to-date and translates the complex legal speak into words we all can understand. Now in its second year this initiative has received resounding positive praise from our people and supply chain it is accessible to.

“The newsletter is published twice a year with the publication dates in May and November, enabling each issue to contain the most up to date changes in legislation that affect our business operations. Also included are articles on court cases that relate to the risks we manage in our business. Our aim is to help our readers understand from a wider perspective the importance of the risk controls they implement on a daily basis. To do this, we make sure we link articles to the parts of the Thames Water management system that explain what our risk controls are.

“To support the aim of the publication we need to illustrate the articles and where we can, make sure the images used are recognisable as Thames Water. This means that many of the images used are created specifically for the articles. Taking this extra step means that the images are fresh and haven’t been seen before and hopefully this increases the engagement of our readers with our newsletter.

“Sources of information used to produce the content come from updates provided by SHP, health & safety professional publications and other similar services, as well as worldwide news reports.

“Each issue is released electronically with a limited number of hard copies produced for distribution to Thames Water sites. The electronic back-issues remain available for reference via our intranet site.”

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