The quality of our developments, the standard of our customer service, the strength of our business strategy and the value we deliver for our stakeholders are all a result of the people who, together, make up Bellway.
The success of our business relies on us having a skilled and competent workforce, and developing our people remains a key priority for us.
Recruiting, developing and retaining high quality site managers is essential in order to achieve these objectives. We are increasing the number of training hours we provide and are investing in the development of our future site managers through a new Trainee Assistant Site Manager Programme with the objective of ensuring these individuals have the pre-requisite skills to develop into experienced site agents. We also have a dedicated Construction Learning and Development Manager to improve construction related training across the organisation.
The Bellway Learning Hub, an online learning platform, continues to provide e-learning courses and online resources for new and existing employees. It allows the delivery of a deliver a wide range of mandatory and developmental training across the entire Group as part of our commitment to further improve the learning and development opportunities available to our employees.
We are also members of ‘The 5% Club’, a charitable organisation, recognising our commitment to ensuring that at least 5% of our workforce are employed in apprenticeship and graduate developmental roles.
We encourage the sharing of good practice through regular meetings across a number of disciplines. Divisional management teams often visit other regions to exchange information on issues of importance, including new materials or build techniques, new house type designs, training and new working practices.
InTouch, an external third party company, provide Bellway with a confidential reporting service known as SpeakUp, allowing our people a confidential way of raising concerns anonymously, should they wish to do so.
We also publish an internal Bellway newsletter to keep our 2,900+ people informed about news, issues, initiatives and events across the Group.
We believe in treating all our employees and contractors fairly and responsibly. We have policies and procedures in place to ensure that equal opportunities are provided to all existing and prospective employees of Bellway, irrespective of age, colour, disability, ethnic origin, gender, marital status, nationality, parental status, race, religion, belief or sexual orientation.
In addition all employees, whether part-time, full-time or temporary, are treated equally, with all decisions around recruitment, promotion, training (or other matters affecting employment) based solely upon aptitude and ability, as reflected in our Equality Policy.
We also operate a range of additional policies and procedures to safeguard our employees/the company and to provide additional welfare benefits:
Adoption leave policy; bereavement leave policy; bribery policy; bullying and harassment procedure; flexible retirement scheme; flexible working policy; grievance procedure; job share policy; maternity leave policy; parental leave policy; time off for dependents policy; time off for study policy; whistleblowing procedure.
We act in accordance with the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and we publish a slavery and human trafficking statement on our website.
We offer a competitive salary and benefits package, including pension, life assurance and private medical scheme. Our employees are also able to acquire shares in Bellway through our savings related share option scheme.
We operate an Employee Assistance Programme through which employees can speak to an advisor (24 hours a day, 365 days a year) on a range of issues, including financial concerns, relationship worries, bereavement, stress and anxiety.
We also support the young families of our employees by promoting the use of childcare vouchers, providing parents with a tax saving, and we work hard to be flexible when considering maternity and paternity leave, including a phased return to work, flexible hours or job sharing where feasible.
| Summary of performance |
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The total number of Bellway employees (as at 31 July 2019) fell slightly to 2,889 (2019 – 2,998) |
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We delivered 4.1 training days per employee (2019 – 5.1) despite the challenges of a COVID-19 interrupted year |
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We increased the number of graduates, trainees and apprentices across the business by 42% to 258 (2019 – 182) and by the end of the year we had 8.3% of colleagues in a ‘learning and earning’ position |
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We are members of the 5% Club, recognising our commitment to ensuring that at least 5% of our workforce are employed in graduate and apprentice development roles |
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We are a major contributor to the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) Levy and the Apprenticeship Levy, contributing £1.9 million to schemes that invest in and support the training of workers across the construction industry (2019 - £1.7m) |
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44 of our site managers won National House Building Council (NHBC) Pride in the Job Awards (2019 – 42). 17 of these managers went on to win Seal of Excellence awards while a site manager from our North London Division won a Regional Award in the multi-storey builder category |
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Given COVID-19 lockdown and the resultant social distancing restrictions, the NHBC did not operate their Health and Safety Awards in 2020. We look forward to Bellway site managers being successful in these awards in 2021 |
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Employee turnover remained broadly static to 20.8% (2019 – 22.4%) |
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We estimate that our ‘COVID-19 impacted’ construction activities supported between 19,700 to 23,400 jobs (direct, indirect and induced) through Bellway, sub-contract labour and our supply chain |
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We continue to undertake a range of health awareness activities in partnership with Cancer Research UK |
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We have launched an overarching Health & Wellbeing programme with monthly and quarterly focus on specific areas of health and in light of the COVID-19 lockdown, we dedicated the full month of May to highlight the importance of mental wellbeing, providing colleagues with useful guidance and links to ensure they looked after both their physical and mental wellbeing |
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We operate several Employee Listening Groups across the company which have helped shape several new policies relating to flexible working |
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Our focus on diversity and inclusion saw the Group awarded The Financial Times Diversity Leaders 2020 award, where we ranked 286 out of 700 companies across Europe |
