CALA Group Limited has won a top industry honour for its health and safety programme on its CALA Homes sites.

The Edinburgh-based group won the award for Best Housebuilder's Safety Programme at the Construction Health And Safety Awards 2008.

The group took the top prize for its Above and Beyond Campaign, a series of initiatives developed by the company's health and safety managers, which goes above and beyond minimum legal requirements on site, aiming to reduce accidents and make for a more healthy and safe working environment .

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Examples of the group's initiatives included providing internal temporary access stairs and external scaffold staircases which remove the need for ladders; installing cameras on forklifts, improving rear vision for drivers; better hygiene on site by making available a worker protection system made up of barrier creams, hand wash creams and sun blocks; and reduced working at height by building roofs on the ground and then lifting into position by crane.

This is the first time which CALA Group has won the top award.

Alan Downie, Group Managing Director and Main Board Director responsible for Health and Safety, said: "I am delighted that our focus on health and safety initiatives has been externally recognised. Praise is due not just to our health and safety managers who devised and implemented the scheme, but to all our workforce and sub contractors who have conscientiously taken part."

(GK/JM)