Safety at scale: How DCC Energy keeps its people safe

As Head of Group Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) at DCC Energy, James Whieldon leads the HSE function comprising over 70 HSE professionals across the DCC Energy group.  Here, he talks about what it takes to build a genuine safety culture in a large energy business – and why the goal is simple, even when the work is not.

As one of the largest energy businesses in Europe, DCC Energy operates at a scale where keeping people safe isn’t a straightforward task. Over 9,000 people work for DCC Energy across 16 countries, undertaking jobs such as driving tankers and managing fuel depots, terminals, filling plants and forecourts from Scandinavia to the United States. Some products require careful storage and transportation, while the communities employees serve depend on reliable, safe delivery.

For James, stepping into the role two years ago was a return to this area after holding titles including Director of Risk, Compliance and Sustainability in other businesses. And he joined during significant change: DCC has since exited Healthcare and Technology and emerged as a focused energy group. The HSE profile is different, but the focus is sharper as a single sector business.

Guardrails, not rulebooks

Running safety in DCC Energy requires a different approach to those James used during his years in other global corporate environments, where many prescriptive standards would often leave little room for local variation. DCC Energy takes a deliberately different view.

“The important thing with the DCC Energy model is that we have clear guardrails where we need them,” he explains. “We have a number of group standards that apply to all, but typically they're risk-based and not compliance-based. It’s more: this is what you need to achieve, not specifically how you have to achieve it. We want to retain some flexibility in the approaches that can be taken, so that processes can be relevant to the local business needs. We don't want to have hundreds of group standards; we want to keep it focused on key areas of risk and do a lot more in terms of guidance that helps people bridge the gap between the high-level expectations and the day-to-day controls.”

Leading indicators, not lagging ones

DCC Energy recorded a Lost Time Incident Frequency Rate of 1.0 in FY26 per 200k hour worked, in line with its target. For James, though, this number tells only part of the story.

“It's only one indicator and it's a lagging indicator, looking at things once they've gone wrong,” he points out. “Where we want to index our focus is more towards the leading indicators: the training that's completed, the leadership tours and inspections, all of the work that goes into prevention.”

The context matters too. Expansion of energy services has brought a quite different risk profile to traditional fuel and logistics operations. Maintaining consistent performance across that level of change is meaningful, but for James, there’s still further to go: “Our ambitions are to continue to reduce our lagging indicators, but that will come in time if we really focus on the inputs and preventative actions.”

From the leadership team to the front line

Safety culture, James argues, only holds if it travels the full length of the organisation. "It really starts with leadership. Our leadership is engaged and really committed. That makes safety important.” he says. “That message – that we don't compromise on safety – must cascade through every level, from the DCC Energy Leadership Team through to the front line itself."

To bring structure to this, DCC Energy recently established a Group Safety Committee chaired by Chief Executive Donal Murphy, alongside working groups on transport safety, process safety, energy services activities, mobility and culture. This helps bring businesses and group teams together to shape priorities collaboratively, rather than having them handed down from above.

When the business grows, so do the learnings

When a new business joins DCC Energy, cultural work begins. "Culture is a long-term build; it's hard won and easily lost,” James says. “But the moment a business is acquired, that immediate onboarding and integration sets cultural expectations from the start: what is expected within DCC Energy, including the early engagements about our ways of working, our values, policies and practices.”

Safety features heavily in due diligence, covering asset condition, maintenance standards and management system maturity. It is, according to James, a good first pass, and the beginning of a much longer process.

The question of who DCC Energy is keeping safe extends well beyond its own workforce though. “There are our people, our customers, and the wider communities in which we operate,” James explains. Responsibilities span process and occupational safety, environmental protection and psychological safety – creating conditions where people feel safe to speak up, raise near misses, and learn from what goes wrong.

Getting ahead of the next incident

DCC Energy's approach to HSE is built on its people and the data they generate. With a group-wide management system now consolidating performance information from across all businesses, the HSE community has the tools to identify trends, target support and drive continuous improvement.

“One of our strengths is the breadth of experience across our businesses and the opportunity to learn from one another as an HSE community,” says James. “Working groups and discussion forums give us valuable ways to share lessons from events and best practice.”

Two years ago, DCC Energy implemented Cority, its first group-wide HSE management system. It consolidates incident reporting, near misses, inspections and risk assessments from across group businesses into a single platform. Trend analysis is already identifying patterns in areas like transport risk, mapping hotspots and revealing how operational risks vary by location and season, but the next step is predictive efforts.

“The real power of a system like that is your ability to use data to drive future areas of focus,” James says. “Once you've got a large amount of data, you can also use AI to generate deeper risk analysis. There's a predictive element to where we're going to have our next incident, so you can try and get ahead of it, focusing our efforts early, rather than responding when it's gone wrong."

James is measured about the timeline, believing genuine predictive capability is still some way off. But after two years of building the foundations, the more impactful work, he suggests, is only just beginning.