Lawford Kidd's Blog

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has recently highlighted the need to improve workplace health and safety in the manufacturing sector.

A risky place to work

The sector is a huge employer, currently accounting for around 10% of the British workforce, but can also be a risky place to work. Around one in five notifiable workplace fatalities and reported injuries occur in manufacturing, and workers can also face additional risks to their health through workplace exposures.

In the last year alone, an estimated 3.1 million working days were lost due to accidents and ill health in the sector.

Friday is the most dangerous day of the week for road accidents that result in personal injury claims and November has the highest award frequency, according to an analysis of 2012 motor liability awards released by the Irish Injuries Board.

The Injuries Board delivered compensation of €157.2m for motor liability awards in 2012 which represents a 2.2% increase on the €153.7m awarded in 2011. The volume of awards for motor accidents last year increased by 1.3% to 7,622, compared to 7,521 the previous year.

Motor liability awards account for three in four of all personal injury awards processed by the Injuries Board.

New research by LV= Broker has found that one in 20 small business owners have no insurance cover in place – equivalent to 230,000 businesses across the UK - leaving them vulnerable to liability claims, hefty fines and prosecution.

By law, all businesses employing staff must have employers’ liability (EL) insurance as a minimum otherwise they can be fined up to £2,500 a day by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Despite this, the research found that 350,000 small businesses that employ staff have no cover in place.

As well as being vulnerable to fines from the HSE, business owners could find themselves heavily out of pocket should one of their staff make a claim against them. According to LV= claims data, there has been an increase in the frequency of employer liability claims as more employees brings claims against their employers.

A national standard for the management of work-related road risk would be welcomed by businesses, and should include ‘back to basics' advice to practitioners about the processes and interventions they should be using to manage and lower their risk, according to new research by TRL.

Dr Shaun Helman, who led the research, said: "For some time, we have known that work-related road collisions represent a serious injury burden, with at least around a fifth and perhaps as many as a third of injury road collisions in Great Britain involving someone who is driving for work at the time."

One of the key general findings of the research was that the management of work-related road risk is widely perceived to be lagging behind the management of health and safety risk in the workplace.

Not-for-profit campaign group, the Association of Personal Lawyers (APIL), has criticised proposed new rules on how insurance companies search their historical records if a potential claim for compensation is being made against them, saying that they are “wide of the mark”.

Responding to a consultation by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) on new search procedures, APIL has pointed out that for injured or ill workers to successfully claim compensation, it must be established which insurers provided employers' liability cover at the time they were injured or exposed. However, this can sometimes be a problem, as APIL president Karl Tonks explained:

“Victims of asbestos-related disease can become ill many years after they are exposed at work, by which time the records can be harder to find. Sometimes they are never found and those people are left with nowhere to turn.”