Have you stopped to think what is likely to happen if someone is hurt in your workplace! Are you confident you are doing the right things and managing health and safety well?

It’s likely that in any business that an accident can occur; although far less likely in a well-managed workplace where staff are properly trained to understand the health & safety risks. Risk assessment is a fundamental tool to help a business to identify any weaknesses and to plan in improvements. If you are doing this properly; but an accident still happened what do you think your insurers would say?

We ask, as a business we have worked with for many years was recently in this situation. Unfortunately an accident did occur and a claim was made by the employee. The business was confident it had done all that could be reasonably expected of it; it had provided training, undertaken risk assessments, designed out risks where possible and had a good health & safety culture.

The insurance company looked at this and even agreed that the accident could be attributed in a large part to the employee’s contributory negligence. However the Insurers decided that it was far less costly to try to settle the claim rather than fight it in court.

As far as the Insurers were concerned the costs involved in defending the business would be too high in comparison to what they could settle for and based their judgement solely on this. The business had no say in the decision at all.

Perhaps it’s something to think about when deciding on who your insurers should be next time round!