No one should go out to work and not come home safely. Your place of employment shouldn’t be somewhere where the risks are so high that you are potentially gambling with your life. However, the Health and Safety Executive have published their annual statistics for 2024 /2025 for workplace accidents and yet again we have another year where far too many (124, specifically) workers were killed in work-related accidents in the UK.
95% of those killed are male, so put into simple terms that is almost 124 fathers, brothers, sons, or husbands who went out to work and didn’t return home. Again, construction leads the way in this dubious roll of honour, with 35 people being killed in this industry, most of them involving falling from a height. Other ways that people were fatally injured were being struck by a moving object or vehicle, being trapped by something collapsing or overturning and having contact with moving machinery.
UK businesses are subject to workplace health and safety legislation which ALL employers should be complying with. No-one should be falling from a tall building due to an unsafe roof, not having proper scaffolding erected or not having safety equipment such as a harness to break a fall. Yes, it’s going to cost an employer to pay for adequate scaffolding, but what is the alternative? Time and time again, we see prosecutions from the Health and Safety Executive because an employer has chosen to flout basic safety principles and put their employees in jeopardy or, worse still, an employee has been fatally injured. As a business, if you are subject to prosecution, then adverse publicity like this would have a massive impact.
In addition to this shocking statistic for fatal accidents, over 680,000 workers sustained non-fatal injuries at work over the course of the last year and almost 2 million people had time off due to work-related stress or depression and other work-related physical injuries.
These injuries, both psychological and physical, amounted to workers having 40.1 million working days off during the last 12 months. If a worker has an accident resulting in time off, then that not only has a huge impact on the injured person’s life, both from a financial perspective and in terms of their health, but this may result in a loss of productivity of the business, a failure to meet orders or deadlines, having to pay company sick pay for someone who is unable to work, and having to possibly engage other temporary staff. The impact of this to UK businesses over the last 12 months was an astronomical 22.9 billion pounds.
Given the potential horrific consequences, employers who fail to protect their workers by adopting a good health and safety regime should be asking themselves - is it really worth cutting corners?
If you have been injured as a result of an accident at work and would like some no obligation legal advice from our experienced personal injury team, please contact us on 0161 696 6235 or via our contact us form.
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