Full Fibre Builder CityFibre Wins UK RoSPA Health and Safety Award

Network builder CityFibre, which is currently deploying a new gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across the UK, has won a ‘Gold Health and Safety Award‘ from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) for ensuring its staff and build partners “operate in a safe environment.”

The operator is currently investing £4bn on their rollout programme, which has so far enabled their full fibre network to cover 1.5 million UK premises, with 1.3m ‘Ready for Service’ (here), and they aim to have 8 million premises “substantially completed” – across around 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – by the end of 2025 (here).

CityFibre works with lots of different civil engineering contractors and, despite some occasional concerns over safety on some of those builds (similar concerns tend to crop up for rival operators too), they’ve still managed to earn the new award after displaying an “outstanding commitment to health and safety” over the last 12 months (reflecting their commitment to the ISO 45001 Standard). Previously they’d only won the Bronze award.

The award is said to highlight the company’s efforts to improve occupational health and safety from both an internal and external perspective. For example, CityFibre has run various build partner safety forums, incident review boards and their continual contractor improvement plans.

Richard Thorpe, Chief Delivery Officer at CityFibre, said:

“This award is a testament to our hard-working employees and build partners who continually strive to maintain the highest possible health and safety standards.

After winning Bronze last year, we were committed to redoubling our efforts to improve our standards even further, and we’re delighted that those commitments have now transferred into actions.

However, the learning never stops and as we continue to scale and accelerate our build programme, we will continue to prioritise health and safety to ensure the wellbeing of everyone involved in building and operating our key piece of national infrastructure.”

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