26 | Q4 2020 Aug20146 Safety First! As an SME, are you able to confirm that your business is compliant with the legal standards for health and safety? If there was an accident in your workplace, would your business be safe? Many would answer yes, not realising what the legal standard for health and safety is, and how far they fall below it. We caught up with the team at Safety PAL (PLAN ACT LEARN), recently named as Most Trusted Health and Safety Management System, 2020 - United Kingdom in 2020’s Business Elite Awards, for discovering ways in which businesses can protect themselves when it comes to health and safety in the workplace. Based in Newark, Nottinghamshire, the team at Safety PAL have gained an international reputation for their work in the Health and Safety sector. Many see this field as one based on common sense, but this approach undermines years of work from governments and private companies to ensure that everyone involved in a business is safe. Having policies and procedures is not always enough. Companies will create policies and risk assessments as standard, but this does not come close to ensuring that businesses are meeting the required legal standards. Enforced by the HSE (Health and Safety Executive), many business owners are not only at risk of being prosecuted by government officials, but live with the burden of workplace accidents. It doesn’t have to be this way. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 places legal duties on employers to ensure so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of all employees. Any incidents that occur in the workplace fall under the employer’s sphere of influence. Companies as a whole, and the directors of a company specifically, are responsible for anything that happens to an employee and to non-employees who are affected by their work. Between April 2019 and March 2020, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recorded 111 workers who were fatally injured at work. These figures are the lowest work-related deaths on record, but still represent a major challenge yet to be met by employers and employees. That is still 111 people who will not go home to their families and countless others who will have to handle the impact of this loss in both professional and personal capacities. An estimated 581,000 workers sustained nonfatal injuries in the period of 2018/19. These injuries were less serious, but the majority will have led to the submission of an injury claim to a conditional fee solicitor. As mentioned, many companies create risk assessments, but these are often completed to appease a client. These risk assessments, however, do not protect the company from risk. If not distributed, checked and enforced, they still leave the business open to legal action. Health and safety offences are concerned with failures to manage risks and do not require proof that the offence caused any actual harm. The legal obligations are clear, yet many directors continue to fudge the issue, doing not what is legally required but what they think is required. In many ways, this is a failure of government to effectively communicate company obligations when a director registers at Companies House, but at the end of the day, the responsibility of fulfilling these conditions falls to these business owners. Do you know your legal obligations regarding workplace health and safety? The focus is not just on putting in health and safety procedures. It lives and dies on the ability to prove beyond reasonable doubt that workers have read them, are following them and that the control measures are sufficient for the task. This is understandable, given that even the best policies and risk assessments fall flat if no one has read or is following them. As such, the challenge for any business owner is not to simply ensure that a set of company policies are in place, but one that employers and employees are taking an active role in
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