The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has published its latest annual health and safety statistics for 2024/25. Below are five key takeaways from the data.
1. Work-related ill health reaches record high
An estimated 1.9 million workers suffered from work-related ill health (new or long-standing) in 2024/25, an increase from 1.7 million last year and the highest on record. The rate of worker illness remains stubbornly high, with the latest mark being the second-highest on record and significantly higher than pre-COVID levels.
Ill health also continues to be the dominant cause of harm at work, resulting in 35.7 million working days lost, compared to 4.4 million days lost due to non-fatal injuries.
2. Stress, depression or anxiety cases also reach a record high
Work-related stress, depression or anxiety accounted for 52% of all work-related ill health, affecting an estimated 964,000 workers in 2024/25 – an increase of 180,000 cases from last year. After falling by 127,000 cases last year, this latest figure is a record number – a very worrying trend.
Rates remain significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels, particularly in sectors such as public administration and defence, education, and health and social work.
This has led to 22.1 million working days lost, making mental health the single largest contributor to work-related absence.
3. Workplace fatalities reach the lowest rate on record
In 2024/25, there were 124 worker fatalities, which is 14 fewer than last year and notably below the five-year average of 133. The overall worker fatality rate is also the lowest it has ever been.
However, an estimated 13,000 deaths each year are linked to past exposures at work, primarily from occupational lung diseases. Around 11,000 of these deathsare due to lung disease, including mesothelioma and work-related lung cancer.
4. Workplace injuries reach a 6-year high
According to the Labour Force Survey, an estimated 680,000 workers sustained a workplace non-fatal injury – significantly higher than both last year (613,000) and the five-year average (579,000). The rate of injury has also jumped slightly, reaching its highest mark in 6 years.
On the other hand, 59,219 employee injuries were reported by employers under RIDDOR, which is both the second-lowest number on record and the second-lowest rate of injury ever reported.
The most common causes of reported non-fatal injuries were:
Slips, trips or falls on the same level (30%)
Handling, lifting or carrying (17%)
Being struck by a moving object (10%)
Acts of violence (10%)
Falls from height (8%)
5. Musculoskeletal disorders are trending upwards
Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) affected an estimated 511,000 workers in 2024/25, representing 27% of all work-related ill health cases. This is positively a drop from last year (547,000), but higher than the five-year average of 501,000 – which shows a trend upwards. MSDs remain a persistent and costly issue particularly in construction, transportation and storage, and administrative and support services.
MSDs also resulted in 7.1 million working days lost, with the most commonly affected areas being:
The back (43%)
Upper limbs or neck (41%)
Lower limbs (15%)
Bibliography
HSE (2025) ‘Health and safety at work: Summary statistics for Great Britain 2025’. Available at: http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/ (accessed: 21/01/2026)
Lone working is when employees work in isolation without direct supervision, and is increasingly common in various industries. But, whilst it offers more flexibility and autonomy for workers, it also presents a unique set of health and safety challenges.
Here is a comprehensive guide to understanding and addressing these considerations:
Risk Assessment
Conducting a thorough risk assessment is a crucial first step in ensuring the safety of lone workers. Identifying all potential hazards such as equipment malfunction, health emergencies, or even the risk of violence. Doing so, Enables you to assess the severity of these risks and prioritise them to develop strategies to effectively eliminate them, creating a safer work environment.
Training and Awareness
To prepare individuals for lone working, you must first ensure that they have thorough training on the correct safety procedures, emergency responses, and the proper use of any equipment they will be using to properly carry out their job.
After following a comprehensive training plan, lone workers should be able to recognise potential hazards and know how to respond effectively. Afterwards, regular refresher training can help to keep their safety knowledge up-to-date, reminding them of the potential risks they may face.
Access to Communication
When someone is working on their own, communication is extremely important. It is crucial to establish robust communication systems, including regular check-ins by phone (or other instant communication devices), GPS tracking, or even emergency alert systems. Ensuring that lone workers can quickly and easily call for help in the event of an emergency is crucial to mitigating the risks.
Emergency Procedures
In more detail, you should clearly define emergency procedures which are tailored to lone working scenarios. This includes knowing who to contact, how to access emergency services, and the location of first aid kits. Having a clearly established and well-practiced emergency plan can make all the difference in a critical situation.
A Safe Working Environment
Ensure the working environment is safe and secure for lone workers. This includes keeping the workplace brightly lit, maintaining secure access points, and confirming all vehicles and work equipment are in good working condition. Regular inspections and maintenance can prevent breakdowns or accidents, and create a safer workplace.
Health and Psychological Support
You should keep on top of the health and well-being of lone workers, especially those in physically or mentally demanding roles. Often, lone working can lead to feelings of isolation or stress, and providing access to psychological support, such as counselling services or peer support groups, can help address and prevent these issues.
Encouraging regular social interaction, even if virtual, can also reduce feelings of isolation. For physical wellbeing, regular health check-ups can identify potential issues before they develop into anything more serious.
Legal and Regulatory Compliance
You should always ensure that you are fully compliant with health and safety regulations. This includes understanding your legal obligations as an employer, keeping up with all changes in legislation, and ensuring that all safety measures meet or exceed regulatory standards.
Remember, non-compliance can both jeopardise worker safety and lead to serious legal repercussions.
Encouraging Feedback
You should encourage regular feedback from lone workers to identify any areas of concern. Not only will this help them feel valued, but it will allow you to implement any improvements based on their experiences, helping to create a safer work environment. Also, remember to regularly review and update safety protocols to ensure that they remain effective.
By addressing all these health and safety considerations, you can ultimately create a safer and more supportive environment for lone workers in your organisation. Prioritising their wellbeing not only enhances productivity, but also demonstrates a clear commitment to their overall safety and security.
With Winter fast approaching, how is the unpredictable weather impacting your workplace safety? From an increase in slips and trips from icy walkways to a lack of focus caused by inadequate clothing in the cold, keeping your employees safe this winter can be challenging.
It is crucial to plan ahead and foresee the potential risks that can impact your working safety, therefore we will now dive into some of the key things to look out for to ensure your workplace’s safety this winter.
Visibility
With darker and longer nights becoming the norm, it is vital that you ensure good visibility around your workplace. This will help you to avoid any slips and trips from poor lighting, or injuries from not knowing someone else is around.
So to avoid these situations, keep your site well-lit (especially around walkways), so people can easily identify any hazards in their paths, and also introduce high-visibility clothing if needed, to ensure that everyone can be seen – this is particularly important when working with machinery.
But also make sure you don’t overlook low-traffic areas, as often these can be the most dangerous. And if you need to, shadow colleagues to ensure that you are keeping your workforce safe throughout the day.
Changing Weather
In winter the weather is often unpredictable, making it challenging to upkeep a safe workplace, quickly jumping between icy winds, sudden downpours and freezing temperatures. Therefore, ensure that you evaluate the working environment carefully before carrying out any tasks. Consider whether the conditions and your personnel’s experience are adequate to safely complete the tasks at hand, or if there are better times to take on those riskier tasks eg. such as working at heights or during cold nights.
To combat the rainy weather, it is also critical to introduce anti-slip flooring, particularly around doorways as wet floors are often a recipe for slips, regardless of the wider conditions.
Ice and Dropping Temperatures
Arguably the most dangerous risk that Winter brings to your safety is ice and sub-zero temperatures, which quickly develop into new hazards and risks across your workplace. If these are not correctly dealt with, they can harm your working safety. However, one of the most effective ways of dealing with the dropping temperatures is through pre-emptive action.
During the colder months, staying on top of the upcoming weather forecast is crucial to safely planning out what your workplace needs in order to keep safe this Winter. So when low temperatures are forecast, make sure to grit your walkways the day before and ensure that all of your walkways are as clean and dry as possible. This gives you the best chance to avoid any icy or slippery floors, helping you fight back against any slips and trips – which is the leading cause of workplace injury.
Another crucial step to keeping your employees safe is ensuring that they are well-dressed to deal with the temperatures, especially when working for long periods outside. This can be done by encouraging them to keep warm and take regular breaks inside when it is especially cold.
Finally, when dealing with ice and snow you should encourage people to actively think about their winter safety. Whether it’s avoiding shortcuts off the gritted pathways, planning ahead to prevent rushing around, or even considering the best times for each task, to keep them as safe as possible.
Communication
But the final, most powerful tool you have when it comes to health and safety is communication. Regularly asking your employees, or even shadowing them for a while will potentially give you a new perspective on the safety of your workplace. Ensuring that they feel safe and at a comfortable temperature throughout the day is also crucial to workplace morale and safety; helping them stay focused and always remain health and safety conscious.
To conclude, keeping your staff safe throughout the winter should be critical to all businesses. Although it does come with its unique set of challenges, with the correct pre-planning and monitoring, these actions will significantly improve your workplace safety, aiding your Risk Assessments and checks to ensure you keep your employees safe this Winter.
PPE plays a vital role in keeping people safe at work by protecting the individual from risks that can’t be eliminated through standard risk mitigation. However, this makes it crucial to understand when and where it is needed to ensure your organisation’s health and safety practices are up to standard. So, let’s dive into it.
What is PPE?
First, let’s cover the basics: Personal Protective Equipment – often referred to as PPE, is all equipment intended to be used by a person at work to protect them from the risks present in their working environment.
This includes everything protecting you from hazards, such as high-vis clothing for conditions with poor visibility, to harnesses protecting you when working at height; no matter the severity of the risks it’s protecting you from.
When must PPE be used?
PPE must be used to ensure that any remaining risks/hazards, identified in your risk assessments, are adequately controlled, and should only be used when the risks cannot be eliminated by other means. This is due to the other means of risk mitigation being safer and more effective.
If you can avoid or eliminate the risks directly, this creates a much safer environment than applying protective measures; making PPE most suitable as a ‘last resort’ option. This is also reinforced by the HSE placing it last in its hierarchy of controls:
“Elimination – physically remove the hazard
Substitution – replace the hazard
Engineering controls – isolate people from the hazard
Administrative controls – change the way people work
PPE – protect the worker with personal protective equipment”
This makes the use of PPE necessary in high-risk environments such as construction sites, where for example, falling objects and moving machinery can’t be eliminated as a risk, making a hard hat, high-vis clothing and steel-capped shoes the minimum requirement.
The HSWA prioritises creating a safe environment for your staff with risk mitigation and training, highlighting your duty to provide the necessary equipment and the training/knowledge to achieve this. Whilst the PPER goes into more detail with the requirements:
“Every employer shall ensure that suitable personal protective equipment is provided to his employees who may be exposed to a risk to their health or safety while at work except where and to the extent that such risk has been adequately controlled by other means which are equally or more effective.” – PPER 4.1
This regulation specifies the employers’ duty to provide suitable PPE to protect the employees when any risks are unavoidable and pose a present health and safety hazard.
However, it is crucial for the equipment to be in good working condition, and critical that the staff is trained to safely assess and use the provided equipment. This is because misuse of PPE results in thousands of injuries across the UK every year.
The Importance of PPE
PPE is the crucial last step in your organisation’s health and safety, protecting from the remaining hazards in your workplace to ensure that your staff remain safe. With the right training and maintenance, PPE provides effective protection to help prevent incidents and encourage a safer working environment.
The working environment is constantly evolving, making it challenging to keep on top of health and safety. But with reports showing that almost 4 million working days are lost because of injuries every year in the UK, the presence of these common workplace hazards are clear.
Although every workplace has its own unique set of hazards, here are the most common workplace hazards that are likely lurking in your environment.
Slips, Trips and Falls
Accounting for almost a third (32%) of all injuries in 2023, slips, trips and falls are the most common cause of workplace injury in the UK, despite being one of the simpler hazards to spot and prevent.
One of the key preventative measures is ensuring good visibility. You should make sure that everyone can clearly see their path ahead, allowing them to double-check for any hazards eg. wet surfaces, objects in the way, uneven ground or steps. Areas should also be well-lit with walkways kept clear and dry, therefore ensuring that the path ahead can be seen.
It is also important to highlight any ‘problem areas’ to alert others to be more attentive. Some common methods to highlight these areas are:
Signs – ‘Wet floor’ signs or ‘Caution when wet’ signs are some of the most widely used options.
Highlighting steps – often bright grip tape is placed on ledges to highlight the elevation change to prevent trips.
Slip-resistant flooring – Commonly placed near entrances to stop wet walkways from becoming a hazard.
Fire Hazards
Fires remain a persistent and common hazard to businesses across the country, with a reported 22,000 workplace fires every year. To combat this, regular employee training is a necessity, and this can be done as a group session or online via a fire safety training course. Afterwards, taking this training periodically will refresh your employees’ knowledge.
It is also necessary to ensure that countermeasures are accounted for in case of a fire breaking out. This means checking your fire alarms and fire extinguishers regularly for damage, ensuring they are unobstructed and functional. Additionally, an evacuation plan should be in place, ensuring that everybody has a safe route out of the building – with any assistance necessary if needed.
Electrical Hazards
Often forgotten, electrical hazards can pose a huge risk to your workplace safety if not regularly maintained. Shorting out circuits could potentially cause safety systems to fail, thereby increasing the risk of fires.
Simple yet regular checks are often the best way to keep on top of electrical risks, with formal maintenance and inspections carried out by a professional when necessary. Some key areas to check regularly are:
Cables – are they all intact and insulated correctly, with no signs of damage?
Outlets – are they in good condition and properly grounded?
Overloading – are the outlets overloaded?
Ergonomic Hazards
Ergonomics often get disregarded when it comes to health and safety, but with almost half a million workers suffering from work-related musculoskeletal disorders every year in the UK, their importance is clear. Despite this high prevalence, it is one of the easier risks to eliminate.
Increasing awareness is the most common method to mitigate the hazards in the workplace, as employees can take more responsibility of their own workspace and adjust it accordingly. The best way to raise awareness among your staff is through training. A short eLearning course can effectively cover everything they need to know, and also gives you a record of when that was last completed.
Following on from the training, staff will then need to alter their workspaces to suit. This will involve adjusting everything from screen height for office workers to introducing equipment for heavy lifting for the more active sectors. Accommodating these changes will eliminate the ergonomic hazards, helping you prevent any injuries occurring because of poor ergonomics.
By identifying and eliminating these common workplace hazards, it can massively benefit both your business and your employees. This will help you to create a much safer and more efficient working environment, which will boost not only your business’s productivity but also its reputation. These implementations can all take place whilst also improving your staff’s morale and well-being by taking the ‘edge’ off your working environment; making it feel safer, whilst reducing staff injury and ill-health.
Building an online training course can be a fantastic way to deliver training to your staff, allowing you to personalise and customise the learning experience, to ensure that all users take in all necessary information. However, that being said it is crucial to prepare properly before creating any eLearning course, to ensure that your courses deliver the required lessons. As often jumping straight into the creation phase, will result in missing content and ultimately a lower-quality course.
1. Course Objectives
Establishing what you want to teach is the first and the most crucial aspect of building an eLearning course. This ensures that the course covers all the crucial lessons that you need to teach, whilst allowing you to plan out how to best achieve this.
Start by setting the objectives of the course, these don’t have to be listed at the start of the course, but it can be helpful to establish to the learners what the key takeaways are. So what are the key lessons you are covering?
Filling in gaps of knowledge?
Teaching a user how to use something?
Where are health and safety measures required?
Site specific considerations/information?
2. Research
Research is the next important step in creating your own eLearning course. As before you start to piece together your course, you need to make sure that what you are teaching is correct. This will ensure that you fully understand the course content and iron out any mistakes/gaps in your knowledge to make sure that your training is as high quality as possible.
This step may not be necessary depending on the course content, so use your discretion. However, even if you are experienced in the subject at hand, finding credible sources to back up your statements only adds to the validity of your course, whilst ensuring that your learners can trust what they’re being taught.
3. Audience and Format
When building your own online training course it provides an unmatched opportunity to tailor the content and format to your audience. This will also help condense the course, helping you to avoid being that dreaded training course that is too drawn out for its own good. So factoring in your audience and altering the content and format to suit, is key to avoiding this and build a high-quality condensed training course.
This will also allow you to change the format to best suit their training needs. For example, if your online training course is primarily for an experienced workforce, then you can tailor the content to be more ‘recap-focused’, to keep their training as concise and engaging as possible. However this therefore wouldn’t be as suitable for new starters, potentially lacking the detail required to fill in any gaps, highlighting why considering your course audience is crucial to ensuring that it delivers on the objectives.
4. Course Outline
Once you have your foundations of the content, it is key to plan out an outline for your course. This will help you determine the best way to deliver the lessons to get your point across.
Start out by placing the key slides into your Training Course Creator tool and reorder them until they sit logically – covering all the key points in the order in which they should be covered. This will ensure that your course doesn’t bounce between topics to often and keeps the learning organised into digestible sections.
5. Content
Once you have your key slides in order, its now time to fill out the bulk of the course. This is where you compile all of the previous steps and complete the course with all of the relevant content.
Be sure to keep this in-line with your audience and formatted to suit, to create the best learning experience. Attaching any media, information sources and site-specific knowledge where necessary. This will also help keep the course engaging, which is critical to creating the best learning environment.
6. Quiz Questions and Types (Knowledge Checks)
With the bulk of the online training course now built, you can now test your learner’s knowledge. This is crucial to ensure that they have learnt the course content and meet the level of knowledge required to pass the course.
There are many ways in which questions can be integrated into the course, so make sure to consider the options to find the most appropriate fit. This means considering:
How many questions are needed?
How are the questions going to be spaced out?
Is one big block appropriate?
Do you space them out evenly?
Are short ‘Knowledge Checks’ the best fit?
What question types are you using?
Multiple choice
Drag and Drop
Sortable lists
What are the key topics to test for?
7. Quality Checks
Finally, you need to check the quality of the course, ensuring that it works as intended, with no errors throughout the course, whether that is a weird glitch in the test questions or certificates not being awarded properly. This is also where you can refer back to the course objectives you set in the earlier steps, ensuring that the training delivers on its goals and has no content missing or being skimmed over.
During this step it is also important to check for any grammatical or spelling errors as well as formatting errors – are the pictures high quality? Are linked videos running smoothly? Is there any clipping or weird text placement?
Conclusion
Overall, there are many steps that go into the creation, research and formatting of an engaging high-quality training course. But these steps are crucial to ensuring the course lives up to the many benefits of custom courses and make it worth the added effort. When done correctly creating an eLearning course provides a unique learning opportunity and will enhance your training standard.
Asbestos, we have all heard of it but what actually is it?
Asbestos is a material used in older construction and when disturbed it releases tiny fibres into the air, which become extremely dangerous if inhaled. The material comes in many different forms and can be found in buildings built before the 2000s.
It was commonly used as insulation but is now a banned product in construction, with it being completely banned in 1999. Some common places it was used are:
Fireproof panels
Cement roofing materials
Sprayed insulating coatings on metalwork
Pipe insulation
The risks of asbestos
The main and most dangerous risk of asbestos is inhaling the fibres, this can lead to fatal lung diseases. However, this means it is only a threat when the material is disturbed, so if it is left alone, it poses little to no risk but should be respected.
Staff are particularly at risk of this as they will be the ones moving around your site and interacting with everything. This could put them in a situation where they are exposed to it directly, highlighting why it is important for staff to be aware of the risks.
The workplace as a whole is also at risk to asbestos, as if disturbed it could potentially harm anyone in the vicinity and will require that area to be shut off and assessed. Potentially harming workflow and productivity while the issue is ongoing.
The type of asbestos is identified and the condition of it.
The risks are assessed, and control measures introduced to reduce the risk of exposure
They protect anyone using or working on the premises from the risks of asbestos
Findings are recorded in an asbestos register
Risk prevention can be simplified into a few practices, one of which is providing information. You should be transparent with your staff both teaching them about the risks and informing them on where it is located in your premises. This can be done by providing information on the risks or more simply an asbestos awareness course. Your asbestos register should also detail where it is present on your premises so you can either show them that or talk them through the relevant locations.
Asbestos should only be handled by licensed professionals, so make sure your staff know what to do if they find or worst case are contaminated with asbestos. This should be part of their awareness course and all staff should be aware if they are at risk.
Finally, if a staff member finds unknown asbestos they should stop immediately, warn others to keep out of that area and quickly report the finding to the manager. Where they can take the necessary steps to ensure the area is as safe as possible (this includes both a risk assessment – identifying the type and dangers and a plan to mitigate the impact).
Conclusion
Asbestos has the potential to be dangerous, however, with correct care and management, the risks it possesses can be minimised. As long as the correct measures have been taken to reduce the risks – such as a thorough risk assessment, an asbestos register and complete staff training – the risks will be minimal to both your staff and business, but it still must be treated with respect.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of people get injured, develop an illness or are killed at work. Although these numbers are mostly trending downwards over time, year-by-year the lives of many people are permanently changed through often through unsafe working conditions and employer negligence.
Health and safety risks can be found in every working environment, so all business owners are required to provide a workplace that is both safe for employees and the public.
However, these risks vary in severity, therefore it is recommended that companies use Risk Assessments and also take preventative measures in order to reduce the risks identified, regardless of their severity.
Whilst some may find the overall process to be time-consuming and, in some cases unnecessary, keeping everybody safe and healthy should be a priority for any organisation – good health and safety practices can boost overall productivity along with making staff feel safe and cared for.
With this in mind, we have put together some of the ways in which good health and safety practices can help.
Preventing Accidents
In 2022, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) reported that around 565,000 employees suffered an injury at work, with 150,000 of these people being absent for at least 7 days due to their injury and over 6 million working days being lost.
These statistics show the direct relationship between safety in the workplace and productivity. Every time an employee is absent, it costs the employer both money and resources, which is one of the reasons why avoiding injuries through good risk management should be a top priority for organisations.
It should be noted that not all of the accidents within these statistics will be due to poor health and safety practices, but it is likely to be a key factor.
The effects of stress
Research has found a link between stress and poor health, especially the low-level, chronic stresses often found within the workplace. As well as potentially leading to sickness and absence, due to a weakened immune system, stress can also be demotivating which can lead to employees becoming less productive.
Some of the main factors that contribute to workplace stress include:
feeling powerless (no control over your current situation)
feeling as if you are wrong for your job
witnessing traumatic events within the workplace
a poor working environment
Although health and safety practices do not cover all of these issues, any way in which you can relieve stress for your workers will not only benefit them individually, but also the business.
Creating a safe working environment
The conditions of a working environment can affect productivity in a variety of different ways. For example, employees that are often uncomfortable are not going to work to the best of their ability.
On top of that, certain conditions can even affect the health and safety of your employees and therefore lead to absence. Environmental factors which can cause this include:
temperature
humidity
lighting
air quality
bathroom facilities
the presence of dangerous particles (such as asbestos or moulds)
All of these need to be factored into a business’ health and safety practices, with measures in place to protect employees from the risks identified.
The impact onreputation
Health and safety is also a key aspect of a business’ reputation, which can either be positively or negatively affected by your health and safety standards.
Companies that have a reputation of providing a safe working environment, are more likely to be respected and therefore favoured by potential employees. The same is also true of the opposite; a business with a poor reputation for health and safety is less likely to attract workers.
With more avenues for public reviews such as social media channels, and companies such as Glassdoor providing a platform for current or former employees to provide first-hand insight into a business’ practices, the potential for reputational damage is bigger than it has ever been. Additionally, for more serious incidents, the HSE publishes a list of all convictions and notices which is publicly available to view.
Health and safety reputation is also built into the way customers perceive companies, which in turn will affect their choices concerning your products or services. This perception could stop customers from buying a business’ product, therefore creating another crucial reason to upkeep your health and safety standards.
Conclusion
Health and safety can often be complex, and therefore requires good management and commitment. Good practices will not only safeguard your employees and your customers but will also help protect your organisation from lapses in morale and productivity.
Every year, over half a million accidents occur in the UK workplace, which leads to around 60 million lost workdays through injury. From freak occurrences to oversights in safety, these injuries often occur for a range of reasons.
As the responsible person you have a legal requirement to identify and minimise the risks, and a common way to do this is through a Risk Assessment.
The law states that employers must make a suitable and sufficient assessment of the safety risks to their employees that they may encounter whilst at work. If you are an organisation with 5 or more employees, this is then required to be recorded – both detailing the findings and any employees that may be at an increased risk.
A risk assessment covers this legislation, as carrying one out involves finding the potential hazards and introducing control measures to minimise the risks, which in turn will ensure a safe workplace.
So, who can complete risk assessments?
Anyone who is deemed ‘competent’ can complete a risk assessment. According to the HSE, this is deemed as having the “relevant skills, experience, and knowledge to manage health and safety”.
Inspection
The first step towards increasing safety is to identify any potential risks: Take a walk around your workplace whilst being mindful of any potential hazards, regardless of the severity.
Make sure to take into account any changes that may happen, as workplaces are often busy and changing, so make sure to try this at different times of the day and week, to see if any other issues present themselves.
These changes could affect the overall safety of your business, so it is important to check often to keep everyone safe.
After all, a business environment can be completely different from one day to the next and this should be factored into your overall assessment. To avoid missing common risks that are often forgotten, we would suggest that you use a risk assessment template.
Communication
As well as conducting inspections, it is imperative that you communicate with all employees.
Your employees are working within your business every day and likely encounter a range of risks daily, therefore developing an in-depth understanding of the risks involved, so make sure to ask them!
They will be able to offer a different perspective on the issues faced, as well as being able to point out anything you may have missed.
This can be valuable feedback to help you keep them safe and feel heard.
It can also be useful to reach out to external organisations for advice. If you have any machinery or equipment within your workplace, it may be a useful idea to contact the manufacturers or check the manuals for guidance.
You can also get in touch with occupational safety organisations for more generalised guidance.
Expectation
When identifying the risks in your organisation, you need to be thorough and not just look for expected hazards. You need to be considerate of unexpected events which could occur, and these can include anything from faulty equipment to something coming loose and falling, for example.
By looking beyond the expected hazards, it allows you to plan for the unexpected – just in case. This will, therefore safeguard everyone that might enter the working environment – both employees and the general public.
Although commonplace, you might forget to think about employees who work outside of regular hours, such as cleaners or maintenance staff. This highlights the importance of considering all aspects of the working day, so make sure to take everyone into account.
Long Term
Long-term risks can often be overlooked during inspections, but it is important to take them into consideration. This is particularly important for environments with unique conditions such as a high level of noise or the use of chemicals.
Although most long-term risks may not appear dangerous at first, they have the potential to cause lasting damage to employees who deal with them regularly.
Due to them being less prominent, long-term risks can often require more research. For example, if you are unsure about a specific hazard (such as sound levels for example), it might be useful to read up on it or contact an organisation who are more knowledgeable in that area.
Analysis
Analysis of the illness and accident records can be a great tool to help you to identify safety risks. They can highlight patterns in ill health, which in turn will aid you in finding the root causes.
Patterns may include anything from location, use of machinery, time of day or even training level.
These real-world examples can often be very informative of the working environment, therefore are key for helping you to prevent future ill health due to a recurring risk.
Personalisation
Risk assessments are ultimately about protecting people, and this should be kept in mind when looking for hazards.
Extra consideration should be given to vulnerable people, including older, younger, people with disabilities, pregnant women and new mothers.
Consideration should also be given to employees with little or no training who may not be fully acclimatised to your business yet.
Conclusion
To recap: risk assessments are a legal requirement for employers to ensure the safety of everyone in their workplace. It is important they are completed by a competent person to a high standard, taking into account all potential risks both long and short-term.
This should be done whilst also considering the changes in the workplace during the day and any vulnerable people who may require extra attention to ensure their safety.
Analysing past incidents and speaking to employees will help improve the quality of the risk assessments you complete, as this will assist you in finding any overlooked hazards and also provide a different perspective on issues.
England’s Fire and Rescue Services attend around 65,000 fires every year, with 14,000 of them taking place in business premises. Evidently, fire safety is crucial to any organisation, and we can never be too safe when dealing with something so devastatingly dangerous.
Who is responsible for your fire safety?
By law, you need to reach a minimum standard for preventative fire safety measures in all buildings except single-owned dwellings, as per the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. This order holds a legal obligation for the ‘responsible person’ to manage the fire safety of the premises.
The ‘responsible person’ is most likely the employer, but can also be the building owner or the person that has control over the premises. Their responsibilities include but are not limited to:
ensuring that a fire risk assessment has been completed by a competent person,
ensuring the safety of their employees from harm,
providing employees with relevant information on the risks identified and measures to prevent it,
providing employees with adequate fire safety training.
The responsible person is held accountable for an organisation’s fire safety standards, and can face unlimited fines or a prison sentence for up to 2 years if they do not withhold these standards.
In this blog, we have compiled a short list of important checks you should carry out alongside your other preventative safety measures.
1. Check your fire alarms
Fire alarms play a vital role in saving lives, so it is key that they are checked regularly.
Article 17(1) of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (RRO) requires the responsible person to ensure that any fire alarm system are “subject to a suitable system of maintenance and are maintained in an efficient state, in efficient working order and in good repair.”
To comply with this legislation, you should check your fire alarms weekly.
All manual call points should also be checked at the same time for damage, and you must make sure they are easily accessible with nothing obstructing them.
2. Check your bins
Bins are a common target for arson, which according to The National Fire Chief’s Council (NFCC), are the leading cause of fires that require a response from the Fire & Rescue services. Therefore, maintaining and checking them regularly is key to minimising risk.
You need to check that external bins are not located close to buildings and are emptied regularly. You also need to check that fuels or anything that has been previously alight is correctly disposed of (e.g. cigarettes and matches).
Some other preventative measures you can take include:
Keeping large bins and waste locked away, so they are not accessible to anyone unauthorised
Ensure bins are not wall-mounted beneath a window, by a door, or an overhanging roof
Ensure they are kept away from the perimeters of the property
3. Check your fire doors and fire exits
Fire doors are key to preventing the spread of fire, as they can hold back smoke and flames between 30-60 minutes, depending on their quality. The first thing you should check:
Is the door structurally intact?
This means that there is no damage to the door and it is still fitted correctly, with the closing mechanism still automatically closing the door shut.
It is also important to check that your fire doors are not being propped open by an object.
Next, the condition of cold smoke seals and intumescent strips needs to be checked for damage.
Without these, the door loses functionality and will no longer meet the required standards. It is also important to check that the door’s opening mechanism works well every time.
And finally, for fire exits you should check that the path is clear and there is nothing obstructing them.
4. Check your signage
The law requires the responsible person to ensure that all emergency routes and exits are indicated by signage.
You need to check that signs are clean and visible, so that in case of an emergency the way out is clear and well-lit.
Also check that signs are not damaged or have a loose fixing, as this may become problematic if not fixed.
5. Check your electrical equipment
Faulty and misused electrical equipment is a common cause of fires, so it is important that they are checked regularly as part of your fire safety checks.
They often have many hazards to check for, from where they are placed to the sockets they are plugged into. You need to check that:
Plug sockets are not overloaded or hot
Wires and cables are not damaged
It is also important to make sure that anything that may get hot or has moving parts (like fans) are kept clear of any obstructions and are at no risk of falling over.
It is also good to make sure all electrics are PAT tested, as that is one of the ways you can fill the legal duty to maintain your electrical equipment to a safe standard, as per the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989.
6. Check your fire extinguishers
BS 5306-3:2017 is the British standard for fire extinguishing installations and equipment on premises, and Paragraph 11.2 recommends that all fire extinguishers are subject to a visual inspection by a competent person on a monthly basis. The result of the test should be recorded, and any deficiencies acted upon.
To meet this standard, the check must ensure:
Each extinguisher is correctly located in the designated space, is unobstructed, and accessible
The operating instructions are clean, legible, and face forwards
The reading of the pressure gauge is within the ‘green’ zone and any indicator is within safety limits
Each extinguisher has not been used, damaged, or tampered with
Fire extinguishers must be readily available for use throughout the building but especially on an emergency exit route. They need to be checked regularly for obstructions that may block access to them and for damage.
Also, are there enough of the right extinguisher type for the risks present?
For example, you should have enough CO2 extinguishers for use on any electrical fires that are accessible throughout the whole building – minimum requirements should be detailed within your fire risk assessment. For advice on this you, you can also try our free fire extinguisher calculator.
7. Check your emergency plan
It is also key to make sure that there is a suitable emergency plan for when a fire is detected. The law places a duty on the responsible person to manage arrangements for actions to be taken in the event of a fire on the premises.
The emergency plan should include:
A detailed description of everybody’s roles
The alarm systems in place to alert everybody
All assembly points
Arrangements for the evacuation of the vulnerable (young children, disabled, elderly etc.)
Contingency plans
Overall, these checks will help give you that little bit more confidence and peace of mind. If completed regularly, they will also boost the fire safety standards in your premises and make sure that any simple-to-fix flaws are checked for regularly.
These checks will also aid in helping you comply with your responsibilities as a ‘responsible person’, but they should ideally be used to complement established professional fire safety measures you follow, not replace them.
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