SAIFI Named Innovation Finalist at the Pendle Business Awards 2026

A finalist place for active safety

Dynamic Safety has been named one of three finalists for the Innovation award at the Pendle Business Awards 2026. The shortlist places SAIFI, our AI computer-vision safety system, alongside Axes to Ashes Ltd and GB Integrated Systems Limited.

Awards are pleasant, but they are only worth writing about if they point at something real. For a SHEQ director weighing up whether vision AI belongs in a board paper, the useful question is not who won a trophy in Pendle. It is what the Innovation category is actually recognising, and whether it stands up against the regulatory and operational pressure your sites are under right now.

What the shortlist recognises

Most cameras on an industrial site are passive. They record, and the footage gets pulled when something has already gone wrong. That is evidence after the fact: useful for an investigation, useless for the worker who was in the path of a reversing vehicle. SAIFI works the other way around. It watches in real time, recognises a hazard as it forms, and triggers a physical response on site.

That response is not another alert added to the pile. It is an action on site: a barrier that drops, a gate that closes, a projected warning on the floor, an alarm, an access-control lock. The system reads vehicle-pedestrian conflicts, PPE non-compliance, exclusion-zone breaches and process deviations, and it acts on the ones that matter before the incident lands. That shift, from recording an event to intervening in it, is what the Innovation shortlist is pointing at.

Why this matters now

The recognition arrives against a backdrop of continued HSE enforcement, even as the pattern of activity shifts. Construction News reports that HSE enforcement notices have slumped to a five-year low, which makes the case for prevention rather than reliance on the regulator to catch a failing site. The recurring causes will be familiar to anyone who runs a yard or a warehouse: vehicle-pedestrian conflicts, PPE failures and exclusion-zone breaches.

These are exactly the hazards an active vision system is built to catch. A banksman cannot see every aisle at once, and a painted line does not move when a pedestrian steps over it. SAIFI is not there to replace either; it is there to act when attention lapses and the geometry of a busy site puts a person and a moving vehicle on the same patch of concrete. The HSE's own guidance on separating pedestrians and vehicles sets out why that overlap is one of the hardest risks to design out of a working site.

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  Innovation finalists at PBA 2026

• Real time

  Detection to physical intervention on site

• 5-year low

  HSE enforcement notices (Construction News)

The regulatory fit

An AI system that triggers physical safety actions does not sit outside the regulatory framework; it sits inside it. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 is technology-neutral and goal-setting, which means its duty to control risk so far as is reasonably practicable applies to an AI intervention just as it applies to a guard rail. The HSE has set out its regulatory approach to AI and acts as market surveillance authority for AI in machinery and equipment supply.

For specifiers, the practical implications are clear, and a credible vision system should be specified to meet them.

• •A risk assessment that accounts for the system's behaviour, not just its presence, in line with HSE expectations and the AI provisions of the EU Machinery Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 for safety functions.
• •Alignment with established controls such as PAS 13:2017, the BSI code of practice for safety barriers used in workplace traffic management, alongside HSE guidance on pedestrian-vehicle segregation.
• •Recognition of the ISO collision-avoidance and object-detection standards relevant to industrial trucks and safety systems.
• •Human oversight of safety-critical decisions, pre-deployment testing and ongoing performance auditing.
• •UK GDPR-compliant handling of camera data, with detection thresholds tuned to manage false positives against the cost of a missed hazard.

Customisable risk thresholds matter here. A pharma cleanroom, a beverage line with ATEX zones and a logistics hub each carry different hazards and different rules. SAIFI's parameters are set to the sector and the site rather than applied as a single generic profile, which is part of why it earns a place on an innovation shortlist rather than a feature list.

What recognition like this is good for

A finalist place is external validation that the approach is sound, and that is worth something when you are making the internal case. It does not, on its own, prevent an incident. What prevents incidents is the system specified correctly, commissioned against your site's real hazards, and run with human oversight in place. The award conversation is a useful door-opener for that work, not a substitute for it.

Whatever the outcome on the night, the more useful conversation is the one about your own sites: where the vehicle-pedestrian conflicts cluster, where the exclusion zones get crossed, and where an intervention in the moment would change the outcome.