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Teesside shipping and logistics giant, AV Dawson has secured a three year extension to support British Steel’s, steel rolling operations at its Special Profiles facility in Skinningrove and at its Teesside Beam Mill in Lackenby.

The Middlesbrough based business, which has operated on-site logistics on the sites for over five years for British Steel has secured a three year extension to manage on-site operations strengthening the on-going partnership between the two firms.

The new deal, which has come on the back of significant safety investments, secures the jobs of over 70 employees and creates a further 12 new roles. AV Dawson’s on-site services play an integral role within the team at British Steel Lackenby and Skinningrove. The team carry out a variety of jobs including, de-scaling machinery, on site logistics support, managing the recycling and waste solutions and carrying out the deep cleaning operations on-site during shut-downs.

Gary Dawson, AV Dawson managing director said: “We are delighted to have secured a further three year contract with British Steel. Over the past five years we have built a strong partnership with British steel and we have become an integral part of their teams on both sites.

“We can provide a number of onsite logistics services on our customers’ own sites, enabling them to increase efficiency by bringing in a specialist with specific expertise and equipment. This ranges from stevedoring, shunting and stock management to the full onsite logistics support we provide for British Steel.

“As a business, we continuously look at ways in which we can improve and expand our services for our customers by offering increased safety and productivity levels. Our recent investment illustrates our commitment to the long term partnership we have with British Steel.

“Safety is AV Dawson’s number one value; we place much emphasis on Health and Safety on a practical level, every day. Both our onsite teams at Skinningrove and Lackenby along with our wider Health and Safety team work very closely with British Steel to promote good practice.

“AV Dawson remains a professional, willing and engaged partner committed to the continued improvement and development of the safety culture, not only of its own employees but everyone working within the Skinningrove and Lackenby sites”

Neil Olver, AV Dawson head of health, safety and environment said: “We now have a team of over 80 members of staff operating on the British Steel sites, all delivering very high standards in often challenging and high risk working environments. We have recently reached the goal of five years with zero lost time incidents at the Skinningrove site, a milestone that we have already achieved at British Steel Lackenby.

“The nature of the roles carried out at British Steel sites by AV Dawson has potential to have a high accident rate, however due to our health and safety focus these are kept to a minimum. AV Dawson has recently been recognised by British Steel for its commitment to health and safety and was presented with its contractor award for health and safety excellence.”

Matt Stockwell, British Steel’s Teesside Manager, said: “We’re delighted to be continuing to work in partnership with AV Dawson.

“In the last five years AV Dawson has worked with us to provide a flexible solution in terms of resource to cover both our Teesside Service Centre and Teesside Beam Mill operations under one contract. This has been effective and worked well for the teams here serving our customers, it’s also brought efficiencies with it too. This is one of the reasons why we’ve renewed the contract with them.

“On top of that, AV Dawson’s commitment to health and safety is proven by their marked safety performance improvement over the years. They’ve not had a lost time injury during the five-year period of transition at Teesside and, without a doubt, that’s contributed significantly to helping our mill operations maintaining Gold RoSPA Award three years running.”