Power Minerals

Power Minerals is the UK’s leading supplier of Power Station Ash products, sitting at the centre of a UK-wide network that guides ash supplies to major project across a variety of sectors, including construction, housing and infrastructure.

Bob Hartley, Health & Safety Manager for Power Minerals is now in his second year with the company. “The initial contract with yourselves was set up between Julian Brass, who was our safety director at the time, and Victoria, our Office Manager,” Bob explains, “we receive the Simplify HR package, my colleague Victoria deals with that side of things, and then we also get health & safety support, which is my priority.

“We have three operational sites in Middlesbrough and two in Yorkshire both of which are usually unmanned, but fully manned up when we use them a couple of times a month. The Wilton branch, where I am based has been running for two years, the rest of it has been up and running significantly longer.”

Aware that Power Minerals had access to Croner’s health & safety services, but had not utilised it, Bob set up a meeting with a Croner consultant. “I had a meeting with Mark Whigham mainly as a catch up,” Bob explains, “because I wasn’t aware at the time what we got with the Croner service, all we knew was that the HR and H&S services were tied together. As far as I was aware, we hadn’t actually utilised the H&S side of the service since Julian left.”

There were some concerns Bob wanted to address regarding health & safety in the business, and he knew this was the perfect time to take advantage of the advice they had access to via Croner.

“The key issue was related to silos. We operate a number of silos, and we’re about to get two more, which are being refurbished for us. My concern was that we didn’t know if there was a standard they had to be inspected to.”

Ultimately, Croner’s consultant not only provided the advice Bob required, but did so quickly and efficiently.

“Mark Whigham came back to me with an immediate response,” states Bob, “which I wasn’t expecting, as we’d be struggling with the issue for a number of weeks. He gave me as good an answer as I could’ve expected in terms of what was in place. The reality is there isn’t a set of instructions, guides or legislation that covers our particular type of silo, there is for explosive silos, but not for ours.”

“So he addressed my initial concern that there wasn’t a standard to measure our silos, and then went on to advise how we could ensure our silos were safe, despite the lack of guidelines. In addition to best practice we want to be legally compliant, luckily—in essence, legal compliance is mostly industry best practice.”