Lawford Kidd's Blog

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has recently published provisional statistics on workplace ill-health and injury in Scotland in 2011/12.

The figures show that:

• There were 9,551 reported injuries to employees in 2011/12 compared to 10,216 in 2010/11, a fall of 7%.
• 64,000 people said they were suffering from an illness caused or made worse by their work, down from 77,000 in 2010/11.
• 20 workers were fatally injured - up from 14 the previous year. The average for the past five years was 23 worker deaths per year.

The HSE has also revealed that in 2009, the most recent year for which statistics are available across the EU, the standardised rate of work-related fatal injury excluding traffic accidents was 0.59 per 100,000 workers in GB, the second lowest in the EU.

The Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) has claimed that a new clause introduced to the  Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill by the Government has put workplace health and safety back into the Victorian age.

APIL president Karl Tonks explained:

“At the moment, where an employer has been found to have breached health and safety regulations and someone has been injured as a result, the injured person has an automatic right to claim compensation. The law has been clear on this point since a landmark case was brought in 1898.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has launched a new cost recovery scheme, with the aim of recovering the costs of inspecting, investigating and taking enforcement action against businesses that break health and safety laws.

Known as Fee for Intervention (FFI), the scheme began to operate on 1st October and will enable the HSE to recover costs where there has been a material breach of health and safety law.

A material breach is where a business or organisation has broken the law and the inspector judges it serious enough to notify them in writing.

Shops, offices, pubs and clubs will no longer face health and safety inspections, and over 3,000 regulations will be scrapped or overhauled in a radical plan by the Government to curb red tape and boost British business growth.

From April 2013, the Government intends to introduce binding new rules on both the Health & Safety Executive and on local authorities, that will exempt hundreds of thousands of businesses from regular health & safety inspections.

In future, businesses will only face health and safety inspections if they are operating in higher risk areas such as construction, or if they have an incident or a track record of poor performance.

Three companies were ordered to pay a total of £232,000 in fines and costs after two workers on an Exeter building site suffered severe injuries when the platform they were working on collapsed and fell four storeys down a lift shaft.

One of the companies had been served with a prohibition notice by the HSE following an inspection at the site, which banned them from working until safety measures had been put in place to stop workers falling down the lift shaft.

A wooden platform was then erected over the shaft but two weeks later this collapsed, sending Ricki Slocombe and Matthew Blackmore falling to the ground floor.