Is safety culture keeping pace in the energy sector?
As the UK accelerates clean power, grid upgrades and major transmission investment, Safety Directors face a growing challenge. Keeping behaviours, contractor alignment and safety leadership in step with delivery pressure is now critical to safe performance.
The UK energy sector has entered a once-in-a-generation upgrade. Clean power targets, offshore wind expansion, grid connection reform and transmission enhancements are no longer distant ambitions. They are active programmes, reshaping how energy infrastructure is planned, built and maintained.
National Grid’s RIIO-T3 business plan alone sets out investment of up to £35 billion over the five years to March 2031, with the ambition to transform the transmission network and nearly double the amount of power it can transfer across the country.
Further commentary on the Great Grid Upgrade underlines how urgent this delivery challenge has become. HSF Kramer argues that safeguarding land for critical grid routes could help remove barriers to progress and avoid delays caused by conflicting developments. For organisations involved in delivery, this reinforces the need for strong safety leadership, contractor alignment and behavioural consistency as the pace of grid development accelerates.
This is a positive and necessary shift. However, for Safety Directors, operational leaders and contractor safety leads, the pace of delivery also brings a harder question.
Can safety culture keep up?
Delivery pressure changes the safety challenge
Energy and transmission projects already operate in complex environments with multiple risk factors. They face all the challenges associated with electricity, working at height, heavy plant, remote locations, live infrastructure, marine environments, civil works and multiple contractor interfaces.
As programmes accelerate, that complexity increases and so too does the risk.
More projects mean more people, more handovers, more temporary teams and more pressure on decision-making. The Great Grid Upgrade, the Great Grid Partnership and the wider clean power programme all depend on effective collaboration between clients, contractors, suppliers, regulators and communities.
Recent polling shared by Energy UK suggests the public recognises the wider benefits of new energy infrastructure, from energy security and jobs to lower bills and economic resilience. That support is encouraging, but it also raises the bar for delivery. Organisations need to maintain trust while ensuring safety culture keeps pace with the scale, visibility and complexity of change.
In that environment, safety cannot rely on rules, systems and compliance processes alone. Those remain essential, but they are not enough on their own.
The real test is how people behave when the work becomes pressured.
- Do they speak up when something feels wrong?
- Do supervisors create space for challenge?
- Do contractors feel aligned to the same safety expectations?
- Do leaders notice weak signals before they appear in incident data?
These are cultural and behavioural questions, not just procedural ones.
Every programme is delivered by people
Much of the public conversation around the energy transition focuses on technology, capacity, investment and infrastructure. Those areas matter. But every major energy programme is still delivered by people.
People make decisions under pressure. People interpret risk. People influence colleagues. People stay silent, challenge, intervene, escalate or walk past.
This is why safety culture becomes so important during periods of rapid change. When organisations grow quickly, onboard new partners or shift into new phases of delivery, behavioural consistency can become harder to maintain.
A strong safety culture is more than knowing the rules. It is people understanding their personal responsibility for safety and feeling able to act on it. It also means leaders at every level reinforce the same expectations through everyday decisions, conversations and behaviours.
Contractor alignment is now a strategic safety issue
For energy and transmission leaders, contractor alignment is one of the most important safety challenges of the next phase.
Large-scale delivery depends on multi-tier supply chains. Different organisations bring different habits, standards, pressures and levels of safety maturity. The Offshore Wind Industrial Growth Plan reinforces the importance of supply-chain capability as offshore wind expands. Even where documentation is aligned, behaviour can drift on site if teams do not share the same understanding of what good safety leadership looks like.
This matters because culture is not only shaped by senior leaders. It is shaped by the moment a supervisor responds to a concern. It is shaped by whether a colleague feels confident enough to challenge. It is shaped by whether commercial or operational pressure quietly changes what people believe is acceptable.
That is why the principle that “everyone is a safety leader” is so relevant to energy transition delivery. In complex project environments, safety leadership cannot sit only with the SHE team. It has to be visible across operations, contractors, frontline teams and management.
Leading indicators matter before incident data changes
The danger for mature organisations is that safety performance can look stable while culture starts to drift.
Incident data matters, but it often tells leaders what has already happened. By contrast, leading indicators can show whether people are still engaged with risk before harm occurs.
Near-miss reporting, confidence to challenge, quality of safety conversations, supervisor behaviours and contractor engagement all help reveal whether culture is strengthening or weakening.
This is where immersive safety leadership has a valuable role. ATT’s work with energy and infrastructure clients, including Ørsted through Thrive and SSE through the Faskally Safety Leadership Centre, is built around realistic stories, facilitated discussion and practical behavioural tools. The aim is to help people feel and understand what good safety leadership looks like and apply it when the pressure is on.
Keeping culture in step with transition
For Safety Directors and operational leaders, the opportunity is to make safety culture part of the transition strategy. That means strengthening shared accountability, creating a common safety language and helping people at every level understand the role they play in managing risk and minimising harm.
The companies best placed to successfully deliver the next phase of energy infrastructure will not only be those with the right technical capability. They will be the organisations whose people are equipped to make better decisions, challenge at the right moment and lead safety in the everyday realities of complex work.
As the UK reshapes its energy system, safety culture needs to keep pace with the scale, speed and complexity of delivery.
