Health and safety

We recognise that the exploration for and production of hydrocarbons carry inherent potential risks. Across the Group, we aim to protect our employees and contractors from all work-related injuries and illnesses through a comprehensive and proactive approach to health and safety.

Health and Safety: A Priority at Cairn

An essential element of our CRMS is to assess the health and safety risks associated with our activities, implement effective controls, set objectives and monitor performance.

Employee participation is critical to success in this area and we strive to ensure that our people have the necessary leadership, training and equipment to work safely and without risk to health.

Strong leadership in this field is of particular importance in regions such as India and Bangladesh where health and safety standards are not consistently implemented. We have health and safety leadership teams in place in both these countries to provide effective management, review performance and identify areas for improvement.

Facilities Management

The design and maintenance of our facilities is an important factor in ensuring the health, safety and environmental protection for those who work within and around our sites. Across Cairn India, for example, our operations have adopted the requirements of the UK Control of Major Accident Hazards (COMAH) in developing safety criteria for all major facilities.

This approach involves a detailed programme of hazard identification, risk assessment and operability reviews throughout the design, construction and operational phases of a facility. Most recently, this approach has been applied to the major development project at the Mangala Processing Terminal in Rajasthan.

Working with Contractors

The majority of operational man-hours across our production and exploration facilities are completed by contractors and effective health and safety management for contracted workers is, therefore, critical to our overall performance.

In recent years, we have strengthened our relationships with existing suppliers and contractors, encouraging them towards achieving performance consistent with our own HSE policies and principles. Health and safety performance is also an important factor when assessing potential new contractors.

In 2009, we continued to address the important subject of how to engage effectively with our contractors on health and safety issues. This has been of particular concern for Cairn India in the development of the Rajasthan oilfield and pipeline. A large number of contractors are engaged on this complex project and many do not have internationally robust health and safety management skills or competent project and health and supervisory resources, leaving Cairn India exposed to risks.

We have worked hard to address gaps in contractor management of health and safety issues, and adapted our own health and safety systems so that they can be implemented easily and effectively by contracted parties. This is an ongoing process but already a significant performance improvement has been achieved through working closely with our contractors on health and safety issues.

For example, a contractor management procedure across the Group requires contractors carrying out high-risk work to be evaluated for safety competence. However, that does not rule contractors out if not completely competent as this would potentially be selective towards Western contractors. The evaluation often means that the Company can utilise a contractor while recognising the need for contractor management controls to bring the contractor up to the required health and safety competencies. This may be done, for instance, by induction, other training, or detailed health and safety supervision and monitoring.