Three RoSPA Water Sector Awards in Five Years: The Safety Record Our Water Sector Colleagues Bring to OCS

Our EMCOR UK water sector colleagues, who are now part of OCS, have won the 2026 RoSPA Water Sector Award for the third time in five years. In the same year, the same teams earned a RoSPA President’s Award for their Thames Water partnership and an eighth consecutive Gold Medal on the Anglian Water account.
Three major honours in a single year. Across five consecutive years of competition, these teams have either won or been Highly Commended every time.

What the Record Reflects

The Water Sector Award is presented by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents and judged across every organisation in the UK water industry, including the water companies themselves. The winning submission drew on the combined health and safety performance of two of the UK’s largest water partnerships.

The President’s Award has a precise qualification: ten consecutive Gold Medals. The Thames Water teams reached that milestone through a decade of sustained improvement. The Anglian Water account’s eighth consecutive Gold reflects the same approach: two separate contracts, one disciplined standard.
The water sector carries particular safety obligations. Colleagues work across live treatment infrastructure, pumping stations, and distribution networks where the consequences of incidents reach far beyond the immediate workplace. Sustained Gold-level performance in this environment requires safety management that is genuinely embedded, not periodically refreshed.

The People Behind It

Achieving this across two entirely separate accounts, independently and simultaneously, is significant. Each contract has its own operational context, its own workforce, its own pressures. The consistency of approach across both is what the RoSPA record reflects.

This kind of sustained performance across two major accounts doesn’t come from systems alone. It comes from colleagues who treat safety as a daily commitment rather than a compliance exercise, and from genuine partnership with customers, working together over years to raise the bar.