Greater Glasgow

At First we regard safety, quite simply, as our number one priority. The safety and well-being of our staff, passengers and members of the public is central to everything we do. Our employees, from all levels and roles in the organisation are constantly made aware of First’s commitment to safety, and that whatever they do in the organisation has health and safety implications.

A number of internal programmes have been in place in the company to make employees aware of the dangers and issues they face daily in the workplace - and we now have a charter of safety principles outlining clearly our approach to workplace dangers and hazards. Furthermore, the culture and appreciation of working safely is communicated to all our staff, including drivers, who are instructed to put such a mindset into practice in all their daily work. As such, every member of staff is urged to follow the ‘First Safety Principles’- based around the simple ethos of ‘If you can’t do it safely, don’t do it’.

Furthermore, the Executive Safety Committee in February 2006 agreed a programme to bring about a change in safety culture to eradicate injuries and vehicle collisions. The key requirement is to change attitudes and behaviours, and we have developed the Injury Prevention Programme (IPP) to help us achieve this change.

IPP is about influencing behaviour and shaping attitudes to improve safety. It supports, and is supported by, all our other injury prevention activities. These include risk assessments, safety inspections, effective accident and incident investigations, safety standards, competence training and the continuous development of our workforce.

Improving safety on our fleet has been positively affected by the installation CCTV on a number of our buses. This use of technology to detect and identify individuals who have been a threat to passengers, employees and property, has been very successful by being able to provide irrefutable evidence of anyone who has broken our conditions of carriage or laws on board, and can be easily passed onto the appropriate authorities to deal with. The design of our newer buses has the intention of minimising the opportunity for accidents occurring on board to any of our passengers. The elimination of steps at the point of boarding, wider aisles and non-slip floor covering are all examples of attempts to reduce the danger of accidents happening while travelling on our buses.

The ‘Nite Zone’ partnership between First, the City Council and Strathclyde Police is another attempt to improve the safety for passengers, in this case those waiting at certain popular stops in the city centre in the early hours of the morning. These stops have been assigned as specific pick up points for late night buses, allowing quicker and more efficient boarding at night, while increased CCTV cameras and improved lighting has created a safer environment at these locations.