 Hello everybody as everyone starts joining us This is the health and safety on the shop floor webinar with co-operatives UK As you know, this is part of our co-ops connections series of events which we're now conducting online We're pleased to have you all with us Just so you're aware there's various sectors that are joining us today Gwyddemion gynhyrchu ond maen nhw chyfnod o'r teimlo, ond mae gennym o berytiadol i gweithgareddau i體mp wedi cael eu ddoddiadol ni i ddechrau. Rydyn ni wedi bod digonwyddoes i'r elfenon wedi fyw. kami'r gael draw tynnag yn mirio ar y panel, adaptio ar gyfer y Cawg Ocsy Lleif yn mynd i ddim yn cerddwyd, ond wedi bod yn cael 25 rhan o'r fdisgrifennu o'r panell nag o'r ddechrau a'r Ystodd Ilywod Weather, ac oedd yn ddefnyddio'n gweithio ar y cyfnodol,MEG, ac yn fawr ychydig am y dyno oedd y cwestiynau. Na'n gwneud o'i ddoch chi i'ch panelis, maen nhw'n gweithio ar gweithio'i ddau cyfryll arbennir ac yn amlwg i chi fel y cwestiynau ar gyfer fynd ar y gweithio, ond i g Fashionhaf Gaery wedi'u tuad maen nhw'n ei ddau hynny i gweithio'r cwestiynau. Felly, ei ddwy'n fwynhau, yn gyfysgol, gweithio'r deall, a wnaeddo'n gwneud i chi You can also speak to the panellist if you would wish to, that's no problem at all. We would like it to be as informal as possible, obviously, and for you to have a chance to ask your questions online. We have the q&a function, so that is the best place to put your questions. If others would like to know to have those questions answered, then there's a thumbs up, so click that thumbs up, and that kind of bumps all the questions to the top. That's really helpful to us as well. So, do make sure that if you want a question specifically answered, then to click that thumbs up as well. And we will also end with a little bit of a discussion after your questions with how we're coming out of Covid, what it might look like going back out of lockdown into your premises. And the panellist will have a bit of discussion with that as well. Again, if you wanted to participate, put your hand up and I'll unmute. So, we do have a poll, Gareth, would you be able to just click that poll. We just want to get a little idea from the attendees. We've got about 13 of you so far. There may be more joining us. Please click where the Health and Safety is your primary role. Just click one please. A secondary role or other if it's not your role. Perhaps you're interested. You can let us know in the chat things like that. Just in the chat use that for stand alone comments. y cwanae ddych chi i'w cwanae gwybod i'w ddaeth i gweithio'r rhan o'r ddweud. Oes ymlaen i'w twfanc i ddweud o'r ddweud o'r gwrs, mae'n ffwrdd gwneud i gwybod i'w'r ddweud i gwybod i gwrs mewn i ddweud, oherwydd mae'n gwneud. Ond oes ei ddweud o'r rhan o'r ddweud o'r ddweud, oherwydd mae'n ddim yn ffost o gweithio ddim ni'n dweud o'r ddweud i'w ddweud, a'r cyfnod o'i wahanol sydd yma yn y byd yn y gweithio ar gyfer yr organiadau. Mae wedi bod ni'n meddwl, mae'r gweithio ar y gwasanaeth, i'r gweithio ar gyfer y gwasanaeth i'r organiadau, ac yn unrhyw beth, mae'n gweithio ar fwyaf. Dwi'n meddwl am fwyaf'r gweithio ar gyfer yr unrhyw beth, Gareth. Gallwn ni'n meddwl am hyn o'r gweithio ar gyfer y gweithio ar gyfer? Mae'n meddwl. A'i 27% o ddiweddol, mae'r gweithio ar 18% o ddiweddol, most of you 55 percent. And this is another role for you. And then the second poll, how many workers in your organization? Again, click the one that's relevant to you. So that's useful for us to know as well. Okay, fairly good mix there. If you haven't clicked already, please do. We just have a little bit more time if we can. Okay. So again, that split fairly evenly. But 30 percent of you have 500 plus in your organizations. Again, really interesting to know. So we will share some of this information with you at the end of the webinar as well. And any of the information that we're coming out with today, the recording of this webinar will also be found on our website. And that we will be able to share with you in our chat links as well. The question and answers will be recorded as well. Any that aren't answered today, we will try and get those answered at some point and then send those to you following the webinar. And without further ado, I think we're probably ready to rock and roll. So we'll welcome Gary from Cooperatives UK. He's our senior lawyer at Co-opts UK and he'll introduce the panel to you and we'll carry on with the panellists again for about 25 minutes. And then there'll be time for your questions afterwards. So please do fill in the Q&A section and then we'll come to those in a while. Thank you very much. Okay, Gary, over to you. Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to today's webinar, which will address health and safety matters arising from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. As I already said, I'm Gary Morrison. I'm a senior solicitor with Co-opts UK. My speciality is employment, not health and safety. Just by way of background, the webinars are risen as a result of the health and safety forums which are facilitated by Co-opts UK. Those health and safety forums usually take place on a quarterly basis and are used as a way of sharing knowledge and best practice in terms of health and safety and are organised for the benefit of all Co-opts UK members and are free to attend should you wish to do so as a Co-opts UK member. Today, what we've got is three very experienced health and safety practitioners with us who attend those health and safety forums. Whilst they're employed by three of the larger retail societies in the spirit of cooperation, they kindly agreed to give up the time to share their experience with you and address any health and safety matters you may have arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. I'll just introduce you to those. First of all, we have Tom Watmow. Tom is a risk manager at Southern Co-operative. Southern Co-operative, remember they have approximately 4,000 colleagues across 300 sites in the south of England, I think made up of funeral food retail and a number of franchise operation. Tom has got over 10 years experience in health and safety and environmental before moving to the retail sector with Southern. Tom has previously worked in both the utilities and aviation sector. We also have Neil Renault. Neil is head of health and safety at East of England Co-operative based over there in Ipswich. Neil is a chartered member of the Institute of Occupational Health and Safety. Neil's got some 19 years of experience in health and safety, predominantly, I think, in the retail sector and he's worked for East of England for, I think, the last seven years, having previously worked for the Co-operative group and again the Co-operative sector. Finally, we've got Roger Mitchell. Roger's compliance manager at Central England Co-operative. Roger's worked for Central England for, I think, three and a half years and in his role, he deals with health safety, health and safety, sort of food safety and some trading standards issues. Prior to joining Central England, Roger has experienced both in the public sector, having been an environmental health officer, the Derby City Council and in the private sectors, global health and safety manager for games workshop and also European health and safety manager for gold that associates a global environmental services consultancy. So we've got a real broad spread of experience there and quite a depth of experience as well. What I'm supposed to do is for me to put a number of questions to our panellist, which are typical and illustrate the types of queries they've been dealing with today as a result of the pandemic and the lockdown. So I'll put those to the panellist and probably take about 20, 25 minutes after which we can have a question and answer session, probably a half an hour. What I do need to say is that the information and knowledge shared today is by way of guidance only that it shouldn't be relied on a specific head advice dealing with specific instances. You may need to take it on professional advice if you're looking at specific particular circumstances. So what I'd like to do is move on and ask some of those questions of the panellists and looking at some of the key challenges they've had over the past 12 weeks or so. I think probably the first question I'll put to Tom if that's all right. Tom, can you tell us how you've managed and reacted to changing government guidelines and advice in respect to what's happened in the last 12 weeks in terms of things like business continuity and dealing with any changes? Other than putting my hair out somewhat, the best we can really, Gary. So I think as an organisation of our size and I'm bound to say this in my role, but we've got a relatively mature business continuity and crisis management approach. And that worked quite well in the short term, these sort of established systems. But given the situation, it soon became apparent that we'd have to adapt that model. It was based on a kind of singular event. So we were always looking at things like loss of head office or IT failure, but we had to adapt it to take into account this ever changing landscape and the impact of COVID on every single aspect of our operation and also to get used to acting with pace for a prolonged period of time as well. So practically, I think for us, what that means is we're trying to keep on top of it by watching the daily press conferences, speaking to other retailers like those on the call, industry bodies yourselves at Coop2K, as well as for us, the ACS, the Association of Convenience Stores. The ACS, for example, got a seat at the table with government. They lobby on policy positions and they have a two-way sort of communication, which is useful so they can take some of our feedback back up to government as well. On the ground for us, we've essentially merged our leadership team and our operational teams, tried to strip away some of those layers of kind of red tape so that we could have discussions about a topic. We could reach a decision based on that discussion. We could obviously obtain approval on that decision and we could just implement it so we could kind of work in minutes or hours rather than days, weeks or months, as we would normally going through the normal sort of process. The ever-changing goalposts, I think if you told me six months ago that we'd be doing some of the things we're doing now, I'd have laughed at you. But we've had to be flexible, we've had to accept that things are moving at pace and we need to move with them and be prepared to change our position on things as well, whether it's face coverings or sanitizer for customers, what have you. In the early days, I know we talked a lot about things we need to do to keep colleagues and customers safe and then things we need to be seen to do to make them feel safe. And we tried to treat each of those with equal importance whilst not deviating too far from the government guidelines. We always felt that those government guidelines were and are our sort of lifeline. There's lots of other information out there which you can quickly and very easily get bogged down in. But for us, we're finding sticking to the guidelines as best we can. We have something to fall back on and sort of steer us through these treacherous waters of what's understandably a sort of emotive and also a subjective topic. It was a lot harder in the early days, but now that we've got our specific working safety guidance produced by the government with explicit recommendations, it's become a lot easier. I know we'll talk about that document again a bit later, I'm sure. But that's been a real useful sort of signpost for us. And I guess my tip is if you've not really got that as a retailer, then you need to familiarise yourself with that document and also register for the updates. It was released on the 11th of May, and it's already been updated twice. That's that's for a bit for me, Ray. Yeah, well, I mean, I can tell you that certainly from an employment perspective, it does change quite quickly. I think the job retention scheme, the last count was on version four. So, yeah, I understand what you're saying. Neil, Roger, have you got anything to add to that in respect to how you've managed and changed or reacted to government guidelines and changes? So, from a central England point of view, it mirrors what happened at Southern with Tom. So the initial thing we did was review our business continuity plans. And to be honest, that wasn't they weren't up to date. So that was one of the first tasks to actually get the various sectors to update the connections and the actual plans and make it fit for purpose for a virus that we were facing. And what we tended to do was similar to Tom, we sort of improved communications. We worked at pace. There was I had regular catch ups within my team on a sort of three times a week. I had connections with retail regularly, sort of twice a week. And that seemed to be needed just to be able to react to things and sort of gain support and gain discussion on things as they were changing. The other one, one other thing was that we were working closely with especially, yes, retail, but also procurement, procurement. We've got a procurement team and they were inundated with the requests for PPE for different types of masks and gloves and sanitiser. So we supported them in terms of the criteria that were needed and that was relevant and that sort of seemed to help things. And again, we sort of updated things as and when they've changed. And the guide that Tom referred to was did seem to sort of set a line in the sand and make it much clearer. I'm not sure if it's our mentality, but that was really useful. And that's what we're referring to today. So, yeah, that's it from Satchel. From my point of view, just sort of letting on from Tom's point, really, I think the biggest challenge in the early days was not necessarily dealing with the government guidelines. It was dealing with public perception and staying in line for the government guidelines. So we were similar to Southern God. We had to make our stance in the early days to say, right, government guidelines is where our focus is. And we're going to stick to this because there's a lot of worried, scared people out there in those early days in particular. Who were demanding that face masks be issued across the board. They're worn by everyone, for example. And it was very easy to get carried away and run at a pace that we really didn't and shouldn't be running at that stage. So I think the government were learning as well. Like I said, the workplace guide now, if we'd had that however many months it was now right at the start of the process. So I think it would have been a much more manlynful situation, but everyone was learning at pace. But we were maintaining the stance and the government guideline is the key port, but we also recognise there is this element where we may have to sway from that slightly just for the just to show that we are supporting our colleagues where we need to. OK, I mean, in terms of practicalities, I think one of the questions or one of the typical questions you said your face was what you needed to do in terms of social distancing, meeting those guidelines and achieving social distancing in retail convenience stores. And I wonder if you could share some of the things you put into place, some of the things you've done, some of the steps you've taken in certainly in your experience in the retail environments and convenience stores. Rodg Jeremy, could you start us off with that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is one of the things that make one of the main things that evolved over time. Sort of initially, we did react quickly. It was our marketing team that generated quick POS and imaging and signage that could be printed off locally in store so that things were put in place relatively quickly. They weren't, you know, they were just they were quick and they reached a suitable solution. Then they were revamped with corporate branding and at this stage, we included till screens. But the till screens were sort of the flimsy plastic because I think we weren't sure how long it would last. So initially, they were flimsy plastic. And then we moved over to the perspective, more of a permanent solution. But we include a floor markings, door marshals, customer sort of managing customer numbers, a one way customer flow. So these were sort of summarised in this content. And then we developed a back of house guide so to support colleagues. So we transferred floor markings in the warehouse from corridors designated a maximum number of colleagues per office for the canteen, toilets, you know, et cetera. And then we're updating it with a front of house guide. So it's evolving. It's one of those one of those many things that are evolving us and when the guidance and the situation is changing. But we're, yeah. So that's what we're doing in terms of social distancing. Neil, Tom, have you got anything to add on the practical steps you take with social distancing, both for customs and staff, I suppose, in retail stores? And yes, I can go. So all the good things that we're just doing, some other points to talk to, we're currently trialling a sort of traffic light system of the entrance to our stores. So this is a self-contained unit that monitors people coming in and out. And then it will using audio and visual alarms that will try and manage your queue for you. That's not only to save us the cost to be blunt of having a colleague stand at the front of the store, but it's also to get somebody away from the customers queuing up the front to remove them from that area of risk as well. So so we're trialling that as a practical measure. A simple example of that we've spoken about previously was whether you would have posters up at the front of your store advertising your quieter times. So if there is a queue, you're telling customers up front, you know, come back at at this time, it may be a bit quieter and you're trying to just flatten out your customer flow throughout the day. Staff working practice wise, and we would close. Originally, we were closing stores to work stock just to protect colleagues. We've got a bit smarter, a bit cleverer with this now. So we're working stock kind of back of house, getting it to a point at which we're ready to get it onto the shop floor and closing aisles and whilst putting it on the shop floor, but also acknowledging the fact that customers will still expect to be able to get hold of the tin of beans that's in that blocked off aisle. So coming up with a process that we can still manage social distancing, customer service whilst protecting colleagues that are doing that. We're looking at relatively cheap t-shirts, so this is around the nudge theory, so constantly trying to remind colleagues and also customers about the importance of social distancing, so if we can have it plastered over our chests on our backs, it probably won't be the golden bullet, but it might just help nudge people along the right way at a relatively low cost. Things like promoting contactless payments. We're asking members to scan their own membership cards as well, so we don't have to, you know, so we can reduce our contact points, and also practically, we've cut right down on the number of third parties that we wanted to come to our sites, and we're now starting to ramp that up a little bit. So who is essential that should come to our sites? Who is less essential? What should we do with field-based colleagues? I'm still working our way through trying to get some of those people back in now, but without having unnecessary contact install. Yeah, leading on from that, I mean, it won't go over the points the guys have just been through there. We are all reasonably aligned in the actions we take from the social distancing point of view. I think the key thing for me is we've got a mix of supermarkets and convenience stores, so not one size fits all. So the government guidelines are quite prescriptive in terms of the things you should look at and like that, but there's some areas that we can't apply across the board in all our stores. Like a typical example is the suggestion of one-way systems in stores. For our largest stores, it works quite well. Big wide aisles, a square box to find aisles where it's in a convenience sector. It's not as simple as that, and a one-way system would actually hinder social distancing more with pinch points, et cetera. So I think the key thing for me is not thinking that one size fits all and also because the government guidelines state that some action is advised, it doesn't mean you have to do it. You just need to justify why you have done it or you haven't done it. And what alternatives you might have put in place. Can I just touch on something that occurred to me in terms of staff working practices? Have you changed any practices significantly? Breaks or restroom facilities? What about washing and sanitising hands? What steps have you taken in terms of managing staff practices? Yes, go ahead, Tom. So I was going to say, there's a convenience store. I don't think any of us will run with too many colleagues. None of us would say we've got capacity to reduce the amount of colleagues in store. We're already running quite light on that. You often tend to have relatively fixed teams of people. You do obviously have people fitting gaps and things. Around hygiene, I think we've all provided sanitizer for colleague use and we'll be looking to do it for customers if we're not already doing it in some stores, I'm sure. Increasing the amount of time that colleagues are able to do. So empowering colleagues, if they need to get off the shop floor for a while and go back of house to wash their hands, telling them that's okay. You don't have to be working nonstop and just up in cleaning routines. So we've got very set, clear cleaning routines that we do normally. They all remain the same. And then over and above that, we've got our COVID clean that's being done multiple times throughout the day. And that's the obvious stuff. It's all the hand contact points and everything. Okay. I mean, in terms, just sort of staying in the area of staff, I mean, what have you, have any of you taken as a policy, and I know some of this actually is HR stuff, but from a health and safety perspective, have you taken any particular steps in identifying and protecting any vulnerable staff within your organisation who are continuing to, I don't mean furlowing or shielding, but people who are maybe vulnerable who continue to work, have you taken any steps to protect them? And yeah, and I'll go if you like. Yeah. So from, it's probably the biggest and earliest piece of work we did in the whole process in terms of the protecting the vulnerable and extremely vulnerable colleagues. And we, the government obviously launched the guidelines that vulnerable colleagues should be adhering to strict social distancing measures. And then you've got the extremely vulnerable, obviously, adhering with shielding. So we obviously had to get our heads round this with the HR department, and what the extremely vulnerable are quite, because they're the easier ones to deal with, if you like, because it was quite clear that they shouldn't be at work, they should be at home. And we had a good idea of who those colleagues were, but then we had this group of people who fell in this vulnerable category. So you had the pregnant employees, you had the 70s and overs, and you had those with the what called the the lesser underlying health conditions, asthma, COPD, et cetera, that we didn't really know which way the colleagues were, who they were. So we opened up a helpline to attract these people to us to make contact. So we could identify these people and obviously discuss with them the situation how we could adhere to social distancing with them remaining at work. So, for example, we've got a funeral division and we were allowed to work behind closed doors where the contact was minimal to none with other people, so we were satisfied we could do it in those circumstances. With our food stores, it was a lot more difficult because it was in the early stages where our social distancing measures weren't what they are now. And so we had to make some decisions around, well, could we actually allow these people to work, bearing in mind that I say we can't guarantee that strict social distancing could be adhere to. So we did have a proportion of colleagues who we didn't, vulnerable colleagues who we didn't, have back to work for a period and we actually set that period 12 weeks. So that was probably the biggest piece of work in terms of how we were going to support them while they're absent, in terms of pay and emotional support and that side of things. We also incorporated our occupational health partners as well. So we had a conversation with them and we set up some arrangement where we had phone consults. So the guys, so those that we weren't prepared and equipped to make decisions on whether they should, shouldn't be work, we utilised our occupational health and they offered us some great advice on steps we could take to allow them to work but maintain social distancing or in some cases they said, well, they shouldn't be at work. So yeah, so it was a bit of a blended approach but of course the challenge now is we've got those people who have now been off for 12 weeks. How do we safely get them back into the business? So it's something we're working very closely with our child department at the moment. Tom, Roger, anything? Go ahead, Roger. Well, just from our point of view, sort of a lot of this was dealt with by HR and they sort of, they led it so I didn't really get involved in detail but one thing just to add is the updating, as Neil said, in terms of the return to work process. So we're actually working with HR to review the form and the process to include the COVID groups and to insert a risk assessment so that's actively happening now just to be able to make the right decisions in terms of certain colleagues on their return to work. Yeah, I don't think I can add much more to that. I think we've got established processes or should have established processes for sort of new and expectant mothers, for example. You know, vulnerable persons normally doing risk assessments for those people so we're trying to use that process as I'm sure Neil and Roger are and adapt it and make it broader to capture these people. I think there is a challenge for us retailers. We've got people who are 69 and it's their 70th birthday tomorrow and they've been working and all of a sudden should they then not work and a lot of our colleagues want to continue to work and they don't want to be at home and to get, yeah, working with them to get them back safely is a challenge but an important one. Yeah, okay. One of the other questions that kept coming up that you told us was about PPE deciding what PPE was relevant, who should have it, when they should have it. Sam, can you talk to us about PPE and what you've done? Yeah. That's deciding what's appropriate. Yeah, and people become instantly become very kind of health and safety when it comes to this and about definitions of PPE or just equipment or extra bits of uniform rather than PPE. People will be quite conscious of the government defining terminology about face masks and face coverings as an example of that. I guess the true health and safety person in me, any output like that needs to be the result of a risk assessment process and that should define what you need. But again, also considering this point I made earlier about making people feel safe, demonstrating that we're taking action. So an example that we did relatively early we'll be releasing face shields. So these are sort of plastic face shields with a headband. We don't recognise them as PPE and we explicitly state that in the documentation that accompanies it that tells colleagues how to use it, how to wear it, how to store it. But it's available, it's there if you want to use it and it will give you some added assurance then please feel free to do so. We haven't found many colleagues to use it and that's fine but we've had positive feedback that we've tried and we gave them the choice so that was quite positive for us. Face coverings, cloth, I'll say it, masks is going to be an interesting one to watch particularly now that other businesses are opening up today it's going to become mandatory in hospitals and on public transport as well. So it'll be interesting to watch the general public and the culture around face coverings and how that might evolve and shift and then that might then drive changes in our industry and obviously there are regional changes already so I know that in central London face coverings are a lot more prevalent than they are down here in Winchester where I am so that's one to watch. As an example for us on face coverings we follow in the guidance as the government was suggesting in an enclosed space where social distancing is difficult we have supplied all of our colleagues with two reusable face coverings per person empowered them to make their own choice and if they wish to make their own purchase as well so they can buy their own face covering or they can make their own as long as it fits within certain guidance that we've provided they can do that and we wanted to empower them to do that and we felt they may be more inclined to wear a face covering if they could design it and make it or buy their own then us just sort of force one on them so for us we stick on government guidance it's advisory at the moment but it's not mandatory but it will be interesting to see what other people do on that there's any other things gloves was a very emotive issue at the outset but that seems to have gone a bit quieter now it's been difficult to supply a sustained provision of gloves but our risk assessment has determined that we only really require these gloves for certain cleaning tasks we're not recommending a worn at all time so that helps but I think as a food retailer particularly hygiene is always important for us so we've got pretty good hygiene practices in place we've double checked our uniform provision just to make sure that colleagues have sufficient uniform that they can come with clean kit every day and I guess the last thing I'd say is any sort of equipment or process you're adding in just make sure that you're providing the advice, the information, the instruction about how you put it on take it off how you store it and those sorts of things Just leading on from Tom I think it is the most emotive subject throughout this obviously the whole pandemic today and it will probably will continue to be I think it's difficult from us from health and safety point of view because it goes against everything we worked to in the past from where PPE comes into play and being mandatory etc so it is a difficult one but I think just reinforcing Tom's point there about if anyone is going to provide any sort of equipment mandatory, non mandatory or whatever you need to make sure we support that you support that with the appropriate guidelines advice in terms of changing the equipment cleaning as well cleaning the equipment if it can be done because in a lot of cases in this particular situation it could make things worse people become complacent if they've got a piece of plastic over their face people don't change their gloves very regularly or they use the same pair for the whole day and then lay it on the work surface in the staff room so it's all those things you need to think about if any equipment is going to be you are going to go in that route and then from a from a central point of view we sort of took a step back in terms of we did a PPE hierarchy so we sort of tried to set the PPE in the context of the whole of the society and we did sort of high medium and low so the sort of the high areas was what the high risk areas was embalming the emergency ambulances work within the coughing factory where that was a legal requirement and it supported the idea in retail for face coverings and the logic that it wasn't proper PPE from a health and safety point of view but the face coverings were more appropriate maybe more comfortable and a decision was taken for us to provide four face coverings for each colleague so we're actively looking to secure face coverings and it's amazing what is it what's supposedly a face covering it's all sorts of shapes and sizes and it's a bit weird as well as it's just literally a piece of cloth with a few holes in it so that's one another option is more of a mask that you think oh that's a bit more comfortable so we're actively going to market now to actually see what is available so this as both the guys said this has been a difficult subject to find a way to find a common sense way but the government guidance was helped us to achieve that and on a practical basis so that's what we've striven to achieve sounds like it's still ongoing then from what you're saying Roger yes well I think we're just moving towards this fake face coverings and so we're just trying to source appropriate face coverings at the moment and the quality of the coverings is variable at the moment so that's what we're trying to look for thank you can I ask you about risk assessments what risk assessments you've done what risk assessments you have in place already and whether you've adapted those to address the COVID-19 issues whether you've publicised the results of any risk assessment Roger okay so we've used the the government's shops guidance as our structure and then we've applied the five steps to risk assessment template and we've used it on the basis of the issue whether it's the groups affected the initial risk assessment the controls and that will be various PPE or various guides and then we do a residual risk and this is done at a strategic level so one for retail one for funeral one for manufacturing and then one for offices so that's at a strategic level and these were about 14 to 16 pages so quite involved and then we've done a summary risk assessment for a sign-off at a store store manager's level so they've signed off that they have implemented the various guides at a local level be that in retail, in funeral across the forefront you've published the results for employees to see we're looking at that in terms of publishing the results we're looking to publish the sign-off notices but we will yes we will include those within the we will make those available to employees at a local level I'm not sure because they was talking about publishing them at the website I think we're saying if your employer has a certain number of employees then you're glad to publish them but yeah so we're just working on that at the moment we're going through the process it's quite involved and we're just sort of working with the various sectors to achieve this Neil, Tom, anything to add? Just from my point of view it's sort of a weird approach to risk assessment in that the government started driving the risk assessment concept quite late on if in the scheme of things after the guidelines or after a lot of us already got these things in place and it's so we've taken quite a strip back approach to the risk assessments in terms of how we do that so we've got strip back format and it is about collating what we've done to date and the difficult thing is if you apply the obviously the risk rating side of things for anything like that then identifying what the real risk is from COVID-19 is quite a difficult question so do you have to do that per geographical area of the I'd say or the number of cases in that town or whatever it might be so we have done quite a strip back version of the risk assessment and used it to collate all those controls that we've got in place and in terms of publicising the results we have always publicised some aspect of our COVID-19 controls on our website and we intend on maintaining that stance and that's how we're going to publicise the results of our risk assessments just by highlighting some of those core controls and we're now in the process of reviewing the content on there to make sure it's current because obviously initially went on there a few weeks ago Yeah not much not much to add really we followed the using the government guidance overlaying that with the risk assessment format with regards communication our policies processes posters all detail the outputs of the risk assessment itself and we've also sent emails to our members the information on our website similar to Neil I guess the only thing I'd flag that we've not mentioned is the poster that the government are asking us to put up in our locations our workplaces that explicitly says we've undertaken it That's a download isn't it Tom I think on one of the government websites I've seen that you can download Yeah yeah so you can get it from the same place you get the working safety guidance that we've preferred to and yeah they're requesting that that people put those up in their workplaces Well we've got a couple more questions but I think what I'm conscious of the times I think the best thing to do now is for me to hand back to Irene so that we can do a question and answer session and allow anyone attending to put any questions to the panel they wish to Okay thanks thanks so much for that we do have a couple more polls as well but I think we'll come to that at the end if we've got time some interesting questions that are coming through and I think also what's been interesting is that face coverings obviously masks interesting conversation with that and the culture of that I thought that was key coming up and also that PPE can in itself be risky so I thought that was quite interesting too In terms of questions so I'll just ask these and perhaps the best person Gary you might know the best person to ask these so how have you had to change your monitoring of stalls from a central perspective in your own personal roles to ensure that COVID-19 controls are being implemented in those stores given that many support teams or auditors may be working from home That's either any of you can pick our suppose changing monitoring and stuff so So sorry essential England we've got a compliance team the compliance team went from a sort of formal audit visit and an audit process to a brief of support visits so it wasn't scored it was turning up one store per day they were often the only people that the colleagues saw for weeks literally for weeks and then about a month ago we took the decision to pull that all because we needed some support to fulfil the risk assessments and other activities but whilst we were doing it I think it was very well supported and they were the actual colleagues were like the idea of seeing someone from outside really in terms of the visits and that gave us comfort assurance that certain basics were being applied in terms of the social distancing and the PPE and other controls so it was a sort of basic version of an audit it was a support visit and then it was reported back and then we collated the results and communicated that to retail Okay could you have maybe one other if you've got anything else to add and then I'll go on to the next question Do you want me to go Tom or just I mean initially we suspended all our monitoring in terms of our compliance inspections the health and safety audits and our test purchasing program we then a few weeks kick started a light touch version of those so we started with a similar to Roger a social distancing support visit where the audit team would be visiting one store a day undertaking a very light touch inspection and it was not again to score the stores or anything like that it was just to check if they had everything in place or they needed any support in maintaining social distancing but the same time we started to drip feed some of the key compliance issues in there so there's a bit of fire safety bit of food safety but very light touch to start with and then the intention is to gradually ramp that up until eventually we will be back to the to the what we call the new norm to an extent our area managers are back in stores as well so they do have an inspection inspection visit form as well so we've tailored their forms to include social distancing as well but they're they're now sort of ramping that up as well and we've put some controls into place about how they conduct themselves when they're in stores and hygiene measures etc okay all right Tom maybe you want to answer the next question and perhaps add anything else that you wanted to on that so this one's interesting how are the safe store capacities calculated and can you imagine this is based on square footage but are there any other fact or they can imagine sorry the questioner can imagine this is based on square footage but are there any other factors you would recommend taking into account if trying to determine the customer account for a small independent shop yeah it's a challenge and I don't think there is a magic formula to work it out the logical way is to go for two meters squared per person on your shop floor taking out your fittings and everything and then working from there when we did that though we found that the number was just too big so I can't recall exactly what we did with it but I've got we at least halved it if not more because that felt right you know we know a lot of the stores in our estate we can take a judgment on that and we did want to apply some consistency for it so we applied that model across our estate having sense checked it with some of the area managers and then we issued the guidance and said this is what we recommend for your store so it might be 10, 15, 20 people in your store but and we had to reinforce this as the store operational team you guys know your stores better than we do and you can see the customer flows and you can see how people are acting so if we've suggested 10 and you think it's 8, 7 then 8, 7 you know what you think is right this is only a guide for you to use so that's the model that we've gone down this traffic light system that we're trying at the moment we can punch in those predetermined numbers into that so that traffic light system will help us to manage those numbers but it's difficult and you're relying on human behaviour and people to apply social distancing when they're in your stores which is not so easy the government guidance suggests social distance champions in store which again is a challenge in our smaller estate and also from a conflict perspective you know there's stats out there that suggests there's been a 25% increase in violence and aggression throughout this because public consciousness people are a bit more fearful we don't want to put our colleagues at any greater risk of those really prevalent issues anyway so it's a challenge and in terms of social distancing champions that's from the staff perspective or do you encourage the customers to do that as well so this is the government guidance is there suggesting that again sometimes I think we find in our world that convenient stores and supermarkets the guidance is sometimes the same the application of that guidance is very different so it's not something that we're actively promoting we're not giving anybody a sash and telling them they're a social distancing champion everyone in the country is a social distancing champion as far as I'm concerned we all know two metres we all know that's what it currently is and people should be following that so we're empowering people by putting the floor muckings down the posters up reminding them that way anyone and Roger Neil did you want to one of you add anything more to that Roger maybe no no I think that was a good summary of things okay other interesting very specific question about have you got any advice or thoughts on the use of air conditioning units any thoughts on that yes so go ahead he added one more thing or the question I did my view is that as long as aircon and fans are not recirculating air that they should be okay yeah very helpful and very helpful is covered in the government guidelines and it is very much you should consult your air conditioning contractor or maintenance company whoever it might be I haven't directly been involved in this one from my point of view I build and services department are looking at it and they're doing a review on all our aircon size to say okay which ones are recycling which ones attach to various different units so is it there were some units that might service a number of shops in a parade for example so they're very much identifying those that are of a higher risk and addressing those and getting the contractors in to do do the review but at the moment I don't know the output of that anybody else want something to add I think just back up what Neil said you know we're consulting with our technical experts on this across our retail estate because the nature of the air handling units we're not too concerned with that in the head office we share a head office space with a number of other businesses there's thousands of people that work there and I know that there's been a lot of changes there about the way that the air is drawn it's not recirculated it's all fresh air and the cycle of the air turnover has been increased okay thank you so this is more about one way systems and where they are not feasible is there anything that can be done to offset this while still keeping staff and customers safe doesn't say how they're not feasible but I guess they do want an explanation if there is anything that you can still keep your staff and customers safe where you can't implement one way system I think the biggest thing we did from our point of view and we did it probably later than a lot of retailers was the limiting customer numbers so if you can't like I say in a lot of our sites we have mentioned not to implement the one way system because we're finding the isles are so narrow you'd get someone stopping the first isle and all of a sudden you've got a backlog of customers leading in that first isle or them squeeze past people and it's been very difficult and also the nature of the isles are not a standard box shape up and down scenario so the biggest impact we had was limiting customer numbers so if you can't implement a one way system then you could consider right we need to be stricter with our customer numbers the other other measures you could include that we've done in some sites for others is the floor to me to floor markings throughout the store so it's a guide on how far customers should stay apart but yeah it's just using a combination that fit that scenario but what you don't want to do is make things worse by implementing a measure that's meant to make things a whole lot better I think the only thing I'd add and I made reference to it earlier is to protect colleagues closing isles down when you're working an isle because that's something that we can control customers, customer interactions maintaining that two meters distancing is more difficult but we can protect our colleagues by providing them with that safe space Tom just just so if you if you are restocking in one of your smaller convenience stores in particular are you likely as you close the isle down yeah we empower the colleagues to do that absolutely when it first when it first started we were closing a lot of stores to work stock yeah so we're failing to a safe position a lot of colleagues find that actually that pushes a lot of our customers to the time which we reopen everybody thinks that we're going to be full of stock and eggs and flour are back available now so they'll start queuing up so it pushes a problem to later so closing the store wasn't necessarily the right thing to do for all of our stores but actually giving the store managers ownership of this allowing them to close the whole store if they feel they need to or close individual isles as and when they need to and also just working a bit smarter so getting the product ready back of house onto a trolley ready to go wheel it out close the isle work the stock quickly back out again open the isle as they seem to work for us it's difficult and this is why I think the government facing into it with face coverings in in close places where two meters is difficult your average convenience store is exactly one of those places so supplementing all of those control measures with also you know we're looking to put posters up encouraging members of the public to wear face coverings something in regards to controlling customers coming in I think it's an interesting question is are the stores paying a colleague to stand on the door and is that in addition to their current staffing budgets is it something that you is discussed with you as health and safety experts is it within their budgets or is it expected to be incorporated within the current budgets so it's security provided it's basically a discussion about the strain on stores and managing the customers but also the budgets as well you've got anything to say on those issues from my point of view we initially when we started we introduced the queue marshals in our larger stores and we appointed a security guard to do that for us we then started to introduce it into the convenience stores and but we it was a responsibility on the store staff to actually act as a queue marshall and we provide obviously the guidance and the training into how they can do that safely we didn't provide additional resource for that as a general rule of thumb however what we were doing at this time is we were obviously our head office functioned very much change so we were given a lot of sport stores from our head office so those that were perhaps there like our training department who we weren't running courses etc they supported the stores and one of the key roles they did a lot of the time was acting as a queue marshall and that side of things it's a really challenging role it's not a particularly in the early days when it was a new concept and and Tom mentioned the anti-social behaviour there that it was we did get any a peak a step up of a number of incidents and that side of things so it's not a great role but no we don't provide any additional resource other than let's say head of office support where it is available I think one of the other things for us that we spoke about with this was we'd also tried to take away a lot of the non-essential tasks in stores so we were conscious that it's a very difficult environment to work in any way we're asking colleagues to do things like manage an external queue what can we take away and what do they not need to do so that they can prioritise you know risk based approach what can they prioritise an external queuing you know certainly been one of those things yeah really interesting so so my my understanding in within central is that we have provided extra resources for door marshalls from 10 to 6 p.m and sometimes this could be a colleague and other times this could be a a security guard based on risk sort of we we found some stores are quite challenging this is ever ever changing sort of with with the current issues at the moment in terms of the the sort of the the wave of unrest currently so this is constantly being reviewed you know in terms of the the provision of security guards so yeah and I think the huge challenge especially for smaller stalls is they're always going to be looking at their bottom line and if you can only ever have four or five customers in your store within the space of however many minutes or hours then you're always looking at can you even open under those conditions so it must be a huge challenge for all and especially those that are always looking at the the margin especially on smaller stalls so we're going to face coverings again I think it is a key topic if they don't become mandatory in the convenience sector is it possible that you might make the mandatory due to customer perception which kind of clues into that that idea of the cultural perception of masks and face coverings which I think you did touch upon I think the one thing that this whole scenario has taught me is never say never so I don't know I if you told me a few months ago that we'd be issuing face coverings at all then I just said no way so it's so possibly I think the guidance is it's my interpretation of the guidance anyway is written in such a way that we should be encouraging customers that come into our environments to wear face coverings coming into a convenience store for 10 minutes, 15, 20 minutes the inconvenience wearing that face covering to you to protect others is far less than the inconvenience to our colleagues who are working a manual job in that environment for five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten hours a day to ask them to wear a face covering for that length of time is quite an imposition to them whilst there are different materials and different fabrics and types that they're generally not that comfortable and you also have to look at how go back to PPE whilst we don't recognise them as PPE how these things work together so if you wear glasses they often steam up and things like that so I think for me it's about just actively encouraging members of the public to wear face coverings in line with the guidance when they're in our environments I think just leading on from that I think with a lot of these things we've seen you find that one retailer may say it's been food retailers up to now in terms of move on the face coverings for example they may take the stance we're going to make it mandatory and all of a sudden the expectation from the public and from customers is that much greater that everyone is doing that so we've seen that in quite a lot of the measures that we've taken so I think it is a food retailer we're all sitting there and waiting and we're expecting something to happen at some point in terms of face coverings but it's going to be who's going to move first I guess okay well we've got just a couple of minutes left and I think it will be interesting just to get another poll out if we can as we've not got any more questions to ask but if you did feel brave enough those who are still online please do put up your hand if you want to have a chat even if you want to talk while we share this next poll and the next poll is about during the COVID-19 period your opening times or whether you have actually been open and trading non-stop since then or whether you've been closed since lockdown but are now open and trading or will be soon whether you've been closed since lockdown but you're still awaiting new directives to open whether you've been closed since lockdown and unlikely to reopening perhaps down to dire circumstances or any other issues so it'd be interesting to know how you've been trading during this period again it looks like most of you have been open and trading non-stop to date and the other half of you well 29% are still waiting for directives which must be hugely frustrating for you and then there's one that's put it in other so if you did want to put something in the chat that the person that's clicked other then please let us know so just sharing those results now with everyone 57% have been open and trading since this period and those others are still waiting for the directives to reopen any comments on that panel before we go on to the next one seems like a lot of places continue to trade doesn't it so okay we can ask the next question then so let us know your main activities in your organisation just so we've got an idea of where you're from so retail essential goods retail unessential goods whether you're a distribution centre a supplier manufacturer producer whether you're in the leisure sports hospitality sector and and other so again most of you look like you're in the retail for essential goods so just sharing those results as well so that's that's good to know an interesting profile as well we are coming to the end of our webinar today we do have more we're sure that we can talk about and we're certain that you probably have more questions as well that you may wish to ask if you do want to do that please send them through to membership at uk.coop and we can follow up on those with you we're really grateful to our panel who have done this in their own free time so we're so grateful to Tom Neil and Roger and Gary from Coats UK it's really interesting to hear other views and also cooperative ways of approaching this issue and it doesn't surprise me in the least at the level of attention that is given to this in the cooperative sector and we are always wanting to share that information with all of our colleagues and those that are participating in these webinars so you will see the recording of this webinar if you do want to go over some of the things that were discussed on our website in the coronavirus section of our website you will find that at uk.coop slash coronavirus and we'll also be putting up the questions and any of the links that came up on the chat again we'll follow up with an email to you or just to make sure that you've got those details as well we'd also appreciate your feedback on this webinar so we'll send you a link if you could just fill out the very quick survey that will give us a much better idea of how we do this again and also we'd be very happy to do it again as well I'm sure for others that are interested in this really really complex area so thank you panel thank you Neil thank you Roger thank you Tom thank you Gary and we hope to see some of you again soon in future and thank you again take care everyone stay safe thank you bye