Health & Safety Risks – Why take the chance?

Any workplace accident or injury could have a significant impact on you business with the potential loss of production time, increased insurance premiums, possible fines and compensation payments.

Although there is a general downward trend in accidents and fatal injury rates, the cost to your business when things go wrong, has risen and the HSE calculates that work-related ill-health and accidents cost UK businesses £3bn a year. Even this figure is widely considered to be an underestimation of the true costs.

Workplace accidents could result in a costly investigation, an increase in insurance pre-miums, the need to reorganise work plans and recruiting and training new staff.

Fines are also on the up with the chance of incurring fines of more than £500k 20 times higher since 2014.

If you have an incident, the HSE will now charge you £154 per hour to investigate the issue and for every £1 that is recovered through an insurance claim as a result of an incident, £8 is lost entirely.

Then there’s the human cost, when things go wrong.

When lives depend on it, health and safety should never be a Boardroom box ticking exercise. Boardrooms need to work to establish a culture of safety throughout the or-ganisation, to pre-empt and mitigate the hidden costs.

Prevention
This starts with Company owners, Managing Directors etc taking responsibility for health and safety seriously, and budgeting for it each year.

Regular critical monitoring of health and safety performance will go a long way to identi-fying potential risks and reducing accident frequency and seriousness
Regularly discuss health and safety with other managers, and critically with your Employees.

It’s a legal requirement to have access to competent health and safety advice so get some and importantly use then proactively not just when you have a problem.

Brexit
As if you have not had enough of this word, or perhaps you would like prefer the word fiasco ?

In 1992 the UK was introduced to its first health and safety legislation mandated on the UK as a result of our membership to what we then knew as the Common Market.
EU Directives imposed on its then Member States the requirement to make laws based on any Directive.

For the UK these workplace regulations , commonly known as the “6-pack”, were: