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During 2003 we undertook a pilot scheme with our insurers and provided employees with health problems immediate access to healthcare advice. This had a significant impact on absence levels. We plan to extend this new process to the whole UK business, giving all staff access to immediate healthcare advice by the end of 2004.

We extended this new process to the whole UK business, giving all staff access to immediate healthcare advice.

Increase the uptake of our on-line training and assessment for VDU users, to reach over 85% of all employees.

Uptake surpassed 85% of our employees.

Introduce additional health and safety working groups to improve safety management in retail shops, customer services and logistics and distribution centres.

Working groups were set up in the technical, retail and logistics directorates.

Develop a more formal employee consultation process for health and safety issues.

We integrated health and safety discussions into the formal employee consultation groups introduced by Orange in 2003. We also trained 40 health and safety representatives and created Site Issues Resolution Groups to address localised health and safety issues and feed back to managers how to resolve them.

Increase uptake of driver training courses by 20%.

We exceeded this target and 300% more people attended driver training in 2003 than did so in 2002.

Maintain our overall low health and safety incidence rate compared to the industry sector.

We maintained our overall low health and safety incidence rate during 2003 and reduced the number of health and safety incidents that were not serious enough to require employees taking time away from the office by 46%.

Reduce lost time accidents by 5%.

We did not meet our target and decided it was not possible to renew it, taking into account that our incident rate is already low for our sector.