Building London's new 25km "Super Sewer" meant getting more than 25,000 people to work safely across ten years of construction, in an industry where the numbers are normally unforgiving.

Construction has recorded the highest number of workplace deaths of any UK sector for four years running, according to the HSE. Tideway's leadership set out to beat those odds.

Before construction began, the project set out to be better. Outgoing Chief Technical Officer Roger Bailey estimated a "good" infrastructure project of its scale, statistically, could still experience: two fatalities, 150 serious injuries, almost 3,000 minor accidents and potentially over 200 incidents resulting in life-limiting occupational diseases. Tideway committed to be transformational.

Ten years on, Tideway has recorded zero fatalities and zero life-changing injuries, against Tideway's own formally defined measure of permanent disability or long-term harm.

Introducing EPIC

Safety induction is too often treated as a box to tick: a slideshow, a signature, a hi-vis vest, then straight onto site. Tideway's leadership wanted more. Not only for their own workforce, but also for setting new standards for the industry as a whole.

The result was EPIC — the Employer’s Project Induction Centre — a mandatory, immersive, one-day induction built and delivered with Active Training Team, at a purpose-built facility in Vauxhall, London.

It sat within a wider health, safety and wellbeing programme. As Tideway's own Sustainability Report puts it: while EPIC was only one contributing factor towards the transformation, it has "proven successful in driving behaviours and culture and reducing lost-time incidents at work."

EPIC puts people inside the moment: a full-scale, actor-led, immersive experience of what it takes to speak up, stop the job and intervene; and what it takes to do all of those things well. The aim was a workforce confident enough to challenge unsafe behaviour on the spot.

Everyone working on Tideway, in excess of 25,000 people, attended the one day EPIC induction. It's a format ATT deploys consistently across clients seeking an effective safety induction. The scale of this project reflects over ten years of running EPIC at the London Centre, rather than the size of workforce needed to make it worthwhile.

What the evidence shows

State of Life, an independent social value consultancy, was commissioned by Tideway to assess their Legacy Programme's broader social impact. The technical report, published in 2023, attributes £18.75m of social value directly to accident prevention on the project.

In Tideway’s Sustainability Report 2024, Social Value UK Board member Mandy Barnett noted that EPIC came up unprompted, repeatedly, across their research: "Many people we spoke to across all our studies told us about EPIC unprompted... the impact is certainly real and significant."

The programme has been recognised by the industry too: EPIC has won 12 awards since its creation, including the British Construction Industry Awards' Health, Safety & Wellbeing Initiative of the Year, and the Construction News Training Excellence Award, where judges said, “Tideway’s training is setting new benchmarks and represents a fantastic approach that will change the industry”.

Looking back across the scale of what was achieved — the hours worked, the millions of tonnes and kilometres moved, all without a fatality or life-changing injury — Sir Andy Mitchell draws his own conclusion: "Put them all together with a common base of coming through here, and it's a compelling argument as to the impact of what's happened. I can only say thank you, because it's made a massive, massive difference."

The scale, and what it means beyond Tideway

By ATT's own delivery records, over 25,000 people have now attended EPIC through Tideway. Since EPIC opened to organisations beyond Tideway, a further 5,622 people have attended through 17 other clients — including SSE, RWE, BP, Taylor Woodrow, and the Crown Estate — bringing the total number of people who have gone through the programme to almost 34,000.

The methodology travels because the problem it solves reaches well beyond tunnels, contractors, or any particular kind of project.

It's about whether the person who notices something amiss feels empowered to say so, whether the colleague nearby backs them up, whether stopping the job seems possible or feels like more trouble than it's worth. Those moments look the same whether they're playing out 30 metres under the Thames, on a live substation, in a water treatment works, or on a rail possession at 2am. Moments when signage, paperwork or processes are often not the deciding factor.

It's a leadership and culture question, and that's exactly how Tideway's board treated it – backed by hard evidence: an accident frequency rate that tracks a training programme switching on and off, a social value assessment that puts a monetary figure on prevented harm, and a safety record that exceeds its own stated benchmark by a meaningful margin.

The Tideway Project is to all intents and purposes complete. The Super Sewer is operational. The standard its board set over ten years ago is one every high-risk project, irrespective of size, still has to choose whether to meet, every day, on sites and in operations rooms across the country.