H&S LAW
Q. Does my company need to worry about health and safety law?
A.The main requirement for small companies is to draw up a written risk assessment if you employ five or more people. There is no legally required form that a risk assessment must take, but it must involve assessing potential risks to one’s employees, customers, contractors, members of the public and any visitors. This ranges from the obvious – ensuring your toy products aren’t covered in lead paint – to the parochial – making sure there are no live wires hanging out of the office walls. Increasingly, however, it also requires you to take account of less obvious potential risks: for example, if an employee is planning to drive to a work-related event, you need to check that she has a valid driving license. Putting together a risk assessment also requires you to consult your employees about the risks and to make sure you have collectively formed a policy for mitigating and monitoring these risks. Eversheds’ Tim Hill says: “You get to choose what those risks are. You say, ‘Here are the risks, this is my assessment, can we eliminate them or deal with them safely?”.
Q. How much of a bore is it to make sure you have complied?
A.In theory, abiding by health and safety law should simply be good business practice – you don’t want any of your company’s valuable employees to get hurt, after all. Hill says: “In most forward-thinking companies, they get the message which is to forget the headlines; it’s about what’s a risky business – it’s about a good understanding of how your business works, how well-trained and motivated your employees are.” As such, there is only one principle that judges and juries are meant to use to determine whether you are in breach of the law: whether you have done everything “reasonably practicable” to minimise risks in the workplace. But in addition to following this principle, it is also important to take note of any guidance released on the subject – all collated on the website of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), which is the government quango in charge of administering the relevant regulation and prosecuting breaches. Although health and safety guidance is not technically law, the courts will often take into account whether you have followed the guidance. The HSE website stipulates, for example, that in relation to corporate manslaughter: “Juries may also consider whether a company or organisation has taken account of any appropriate health and safety guidance and the extent to which the evidence shows that there were attitudes, policies, systems or accepted practices within the organisation that encouraged any such serious management failure.”
Q. What happens if I don’t bother?
A.Health and safety law is a criminal matter and since January last year, the maximum sentence changed from a fine to up to two years in jail. This will only apply in the worst cases – if, for example, employees die as a result of negligence. In addition, there is the threat of being sued to consider. Although this is not technically part of health and safety law, again, lawyers will draw on health and safety guidance to implicate you or your company. So it’s probably a good idea to incorporate some safety measures into your business operations.