As our motto "Zero Accidents" indicates, we are convinced that all accidents are preventable and that maintaining the physical and mental health of our employees is essential.

That is why occupational safety is a top priority at E.ON. Our minimum standards for occupational health and safety were made mandatory for all market and business units in 2006. In 2008, these standards will be summarized in a groupwide guideline. In addition, the E.ON Board of Management also approved a groupwide health and safety strategy in 2007 in order to drive this process forward. The objective is to make employees even more aware of this important topic and to integrate safety aspects into business activities even more intensively.We are well on our way towards establishing a safety culture for the group. However, much remains to be done. Our goal is to become an energy industry leader in terms of occupational safety throughout the group.

In October 2007, the Action Plan Safety 2007 was prepared in order to gain employee support for the highest safety standards throughout the group. It includes a number of measures for communicating occupational safety information in the group "from the top down" – from the Board of Management through middle management to the employees. The "safe.TEG" project was already launched under this initiative in 2007.

Numerous other measures to establish a groupwide safety culture are already planned. An Executive Safety Council will be established at Corporate Center and all market units in 2008. E.ON U.S. constitutes the "best practices" example in this regard. The introduction of a groupwide "Health and Safety Management Systems" is planned for mid-2008. Relevant information from an investigation report concerning an accident in the American petroleum industry will be incorporated into this initiative. The report contains indications regarding potential company safety shortfalls which we also need to avoid. The E.ON-wide introduction of a central accident reporting and follow-up system via the intranet or a call center is planned for 2009. The so-called whistleblower process, which encourages employees to report problems or safety shortfalls that come to their attention, will also be expanded.

In order to increase awareness of occupational safety at the top management level in particular, we launched the groupwide project "safe.TEG" (TEG: Top Executive Group) in October 2007 in cooperation with DuPont Safety Resources. DuPont is one of the largest chemical and technology groups in the world and has made a name for itself with its occupational safety programs. In February 2008, "safe.TEG" started out with an online survey and individual interviews with all 250 top executives (TEG). Measures to improve occupational safety will be derived from the results. Occupational safety has been integrated into management target agreements since 2007.

E.ON is the industry leader in the fields of occupational safety and healthcare. Compared to our regional competitors, the majority of our market units can boast a substantially lower accident rate. The lost time injury frequency (LTIF) index clearly demonstrates our high level of success in this area. The LTIF indicates the frequency of work-related accidents per million working hours. In 2007, our average LTIF was 3.0. In other words, throughout the entire E.ON Group there was an average of 3 accidents per million working hours. This means we have reached our goal for 2007 (LTIF 3.3) and reduced work-related accidents by more than half since 2004. While this is certainly encouraging, we need to do even better: our new objective is to reduce the number of accidents in the group to an LTIF of 2.6 in 2008. By 2010, we hope to achieve a groupwide LTIF value of 2.0.

E.ON Benelux is setting a good example in terms of occupational safety. In 2007, the efforts of the Dutch company were recognized with the DuPont Safety Award. Over two million working hours were accumulated without a single accident. Several exemplary safety initiatives contributed to this achievement. All business units will be able to benefit from this accumulated experience in the future: an E.ON workgroup with international representatives has compiled a safety catalogue that establishes groupwide standards for working on construction sites.

Under the motto "Destination ZERO" ("zero accidents" is the stated goal), E.ON UK and E.ON U.S. want to commit our managers to take more responsibility for occupational safety. From analysis to training, they are provided with a selection of tools and methods for sustainable accident prevention. With an LTIF of 0.8 (2006: 1.2), E.ON U.S. is the group leader and far better than the average for the American public utility industry (2006: 4.7)

Sustainable accident prevention requires learning from mistakes and reliably eliminating safety shortfalls. LTIF does not reflect the overall safety situation in a company, but merely reports the frequency of injuries resulting in lost time. For improved analysis, we introduced the TRIF index (Total Recordable Injury Frequency: total number of all reported accidents) in 2007. Initial groupwide data will be available starting in 2008. This will include accidents that result in a limited ability to work or require medical treatment. With the new system, situations that lead to accidents (harmful events) without resulting in lost time will be uncovered. We hope this improvement will represent a major advancement in guaranteeing the safety of our employees.

In the future, E.ON intends to make the safety culture established within the group mandatory for its suppliers and contractual partners. E.ON U.S. and E.ON UK have already launched the "Performing Contractors Management Program" for this purpose. The objective of this program is to guarantee that suppliers also adhere to the highest safety standards. All market units in existence at the start of 2007 are already working towards the implementation of this initiative. New market units have been asked to join the program as soon as possible. There are already established occupational safety instructions for contractors at all our sites. On top of that, before being contracted all companies are checked for safety standards by our procurement department.