May 2012

Leeds Met scores safety hat-trick

Leeds Metropolitan University has achieved a Gold award in the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) Occupational Health and Safety Awards for the third year running.

The RoSPA scheme looks not only at accident records but also entrants' health and safety management systems, including important practices such as strong leadership and workforce involvement.

John Hamilton, Head of Safety, Health and Wellbeing at Leeds Metropolitan, said: Achieving the gold award for a third year running is a great achievement for our university. It reflects the hard work that staff in all the faculties and services put in to ensure we have a safe environment in which to work and study. David Rawlins, RoSPAs Awards Manager, added: The RoSPA Awards programme provides well-deserved recognition for the winners and spurs on other organisations to raise their standards of accident and ill health prevention. We congratulate Leeds Metropolitan University on its success and encourage it, and all our other winners, to remain committed to safety and health, an approach that is well recognised to be good for workers and the bottom line.

The Gold award will be presented at a ceremony, which coincides with the Safety and Health Expo 2012, at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham on Thursday 17 May. The majority of RoSPA's awards are non-competitive,

awarding achievement at merit, bronze, silver and gold levels, based on a range of performance criteria. Competitive awards are presented in more than 20 sectors.

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For further details please contact Carrie Braithwaite in the Communications team at Leeds Met on 0113 812 3022 or email c.braithwaite@leedsmet.ac.uk

Notes for editors: Leeds Metropolitan University has over 25,000 students and around 3,000 staff. The Vice Chancellor of Leeds Metropolitan University is Professor Susan Price and the Chair of the Board is Lord Woolmer of Leeds. Leeds Metropolitans four faculties are: Arts, Environment and Technology, Business & Law, Health and Social Sciences, and Carnegie. Leeds Metropolitans heritage can be traced back to the founding of the Mechanics Institute in Leeds in 1824. International students rated the University top in the UK for language support, accommodation quality and learning spaces in the 2010 Autumn Wave of the International Student Barometer and sixth in the world for the quality of its lectures. We have over 1,500 international students from 122 countries around the globe. The Universitys award-winning learning environments include

Broadcasting Place, which was voted the best tall building in the world in 2010 by the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) and also winner of the 2010 Leeds Architecture Awards New Building category.