Stop-work authority appears in every safety policy. In practice it works only where a worker who uses it faces no cost — no lost pay, no reassignment, no informal consequence.
We track the number of stop-work events raised as a positive indicator. A site reporting zero is not a safe site; it is a site where people do not believe the policy.
What we measure
Alongside lost-time injury frequency we report leading indicators that show whether the system is being used before something goes wrong.
- Stop-work events raised, and the resolution of each
- Near-miss reports per 100,000 hours worked
- Safety observations closed within the target period
- Toolbox talk attendance against site headcount
- Permit audit findings and repeat findings
Closing the loop
Every stop-work event gets a written outcome and is fed back to the crew that raised it. Where the underlying cause was a planning failure rather than a site decision, that goes into the method statement for the next project.