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.

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.

The Attorney General, Dominic Grieve QC MP, has announced that although his consideration of the evidence is not complete, he has made the decision to apply to the High Court to quash the inquest verdicts of the 96 victims and order fresh inquests.

He will now write to the families of the victims to give them the opportunity to make representations, and continue the detailed work of preparing an application.

The Attorney General, in a Written Ministerial Statement to Parliament, said:

An Essex firm has been prosecuted after one of its employees suffered life-changing injuries when he fell from a stepladder while spray-painting a lorry.

The 51-year-old man shattered his left shoulder and collar bone, broke several ribs and received a deep cut to his head in the fall.  

The company was prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) after an investigation found that the same employee had fallen off a stepladder just one month before the incident, but no action had been taken to improve safety at the site.

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.