Award Nomination:
COMET & Forth Ports: A Partnership Built on Safer Futures
Since 2023, COMET has partnered with Forth Ports, one of the UK’s leading port operators, to embed a culture of proactive safety leadership across the organisation. This collaboration reflects a shared conviction that lasting safety improvement comes not from compliance alone, but from genuine cultural change, rooted in understanding and ownership at every level.
At the heart of the partnership is Safety F1rst, a bespoke safety leadership learning programme designed in close collaboration with Forth Ports’ teams and anchored directly in the company’s own values. Rather than adopting an off-the-shelf solution, COMET worked with Forth Ports to create something that felt authentically theirs, ensuring relevance and real behavioural impact across leadership layers.
Alongside programme delivery, COMET conducted a detailed review of Forth Ports’ incident management system data, analysing the quality, consistency, and accuracy of reported data. This diagnostic work has been critical in identifying gaps in how incidents and near misses are captured and communicated, unlocking richer insight and enabling more targeted learning. The third strand of the partnership introduces the COMET Investigation & Root Cause Analysis (RCA) methodology, equipping Forth Ports with a structured, evidence-based approach to understanding why incidents occur. By moving beyond surface-level corrective actions, this methodology supports the development of lasting interventions designed to eliminate or significantly reduce repeat events.
Together, these three workstreams represent a holistic, integrated approach to safety transformation, one built on data, leadership, and a relentless commitment to learning.
Additional Information:
Why the project was needed
Forth Ports recognised that improving safety outcomes required more than process and procedure; they wanted to work towards a cultural shift at all levels of the organisation. The ambition was to build an organisation where safety is felt and owned by the workforce.
Individual incidents were being recorded and responded to, but the organisation didn’t have the tools, capability, and cultural foundation to learn from them. Safety leadership was not consistent across its operations, some managers leading well, others defaulting to process compliance rather than genuine engagement, meaning the experience of safety for frontline workers varied significantly depending on who they worked for.
At the same time, the data held in Evotix was of variable quality and not in meaningful numbers to be able to confidently identify trends and design interventions. And without a structured investigation methodology, the real causes of incidents were going unaddressed, allowing the same types of events to reoccur.
In short, the three strands were needed because the organisation had the infrastructure of a safety management system, but not yet the leadership culture, data integrity, or investigative depth to make it work as intended.
What happened
Safety culture training: Forth Ports Safety F1rst workshops were designed to embed a proactive safety culture across the organisation. We delivered five structured sessions blending group discussion, activities, case studies, and self-assessment in areas like human error & organisational performance (HOP principles), Safety psychology & situational awareness, consequences modelling, the human and personal impact of incidents, and effective communication and intervention skills
Data HealthCheck: The exercise combined two strands: a qualitative review of data gathering methods, culture, and behaviours through stakeholder conversations and documentation review; and a quantitative assessment applying metric tests, including Shannon Entropy, Type-Token Ratio, Readability, Stopword Rate, and Word Count, to approximately 690 incident and near-miss descriptions from 2023 to 2025. A full report and recommendations was issued.
COMET RCA: With COMET’s help, Forth Ports configured and implemented the investigation and root cause analysis methodology across their operations, simultaneously training investigators and team leaders in investigation best practice. Forth Ports now has a cohort of competent investigators capable of investigating any size and severity of incident and importantly extracting the operational and business learning. Using better quality data from their Evotix reporting system, COMET now has the benefit of higher quality input data, much of this resulting from the Data HealthCheck completed earlier.
How success has been measured
Safety Culture Training: Participants are now able to recognise and reduce human error, understand how culture and mindset affect safety behaviour, communicate assertively, intervene confidently, and commit to personal actions for a safer workplace, captured through individual action plans.
Data HealthCheck: Reporting quality was improved year-on-year between 2023-2025, and incident reporting volumes at Tilbury are significantly higher than they were two years ago, reflecting a meaningful shift in workforce behaviour. Staff now report feeling more comfortable speaking up, with transparency described as the best it has ever been.
Further, COMET Signals, accessed via PSS, is now in active use at Forth Ports, saving the H&S team an estimated three days per month through natural language analysis of safety data.
COMET RCA: A reduction in repeat incident types following implementation of COMET-methodology investigations. There has been a shift away from ‘single fixes’ addressing only corrective actions, to preventive actions that address root causes. And finally, an internal capability growth – Forth Ports now has several staff trained and accredited in the methodology, which can be applied across more than just safety.
