What can happen if you don’t invest in your staff’s health and safety?

Posted 5 years ago

Quite often, the sheer amount of health & safety legislation can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re unfamiliar with it.

Luckily, you don’t need to know it all as not all health & safety legislation is relevant to a single organisation – however, you MUST be familiar with the legislation that is applicable to you.

Cutting health & safety training is just not viable, it’s CRUCIAL that you provide correct health & safety training to new staff and make sure their training is refreshed every year, at least. If training isn’t provided to staff, there can be devastating consequences; just look at the following examples.

Big fines

A giant in the world of chain supermarkets was fined over £1 million in 2017 after a driver, who had only worked for the organisation for two weeks, suffered major injuries to his foot while operating an electric pallet truck at one of its stores.

SHPOnline tells us that the company “relied on new drivers shadowing other drivers before they started working alone and did not have in place a standardised training programme to make sure drivers had the necessary skills to operate equipment”.

Proper training was not given in order to cut corners and save money, but in the end, the organisation paid the price.

Damaged reputation

A good reputation is an integral part of any organisation’s success. It is ultimately one of the deciding factors in attracting new clients, investors, and employees. However, non-compliance with health & safety legislation can cost an organisation its good reputation.

Rewinding back to 2010, a giant multinational oil and gas company was fined $40 BILLION when 11 people were killed as a result of an explosion on an oil rig. The explosion was found to be the result of loosely established health & safety practices.

This just goes to show the importance of communicating health & safety practices to all workers, it’s not enough to simply have them in place.

Legal consequences

Pleading ignorant to health & safety law will not help your case after an accident. There can be serious legal consequences for individuals involved in gross negligence, as well as fines for an organisation as a whole.

A manager of a construction company was arrested for manslaughter by gross negligence in 2016. Findings of the HSE investigation included unsafe working practices, a lack of protective equipment, no safety warnings, and no qualified first aider on site.

The man was ordered to serve 3 years in jail as a result.

Health & Safety Training

Here at iHasco, we aim to help organisations provide the correct awareness information to their staff regarding Health & Safety and HR compliance.

We do this through a blend of easily understood, interesting content, and engaging graphics and animation that can be completed in bitesize chunks to further boost engagement with the training.

Our training helps to break the negative stigma surrounding training by making it easy to implement and both quick and enjoyable to complete.

Claim your free trial to our wide range of Online Health & Safety Training courses today!