Slips and trips: the £60 fix that beats a five-figure claim

What changed

Nothing in the law — and that is the point. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations have required floors to be kept free of slip and trip risks since 1992. What has changed is enforcement economics: if an inspector finds a material breach, HSE recovers its time under Fee for Intervention at over £170 an hour, from the first minute of the visit. An unmanaged wet floor is no longer just a claim risk; it bills by the hour.

A guide you can act on this week

Walk your site once with fresh eyes and fix the boring things first:

• Buy the drainage mat for the wash-up area you have been meaning to order. That is the £60 fix.
• Tape down or re-route the cable that crosses a walkway.
• Move the delivery staging spot out of the corridor.
• Make "clean as you go" someone's named responsibility per shift, not everyone's in general.

Then write down what you did. A dated photo and one line in your log turns a good habit into evidence.

A lesson from the field

A restaurant's kitchen porter slipped on a persistently wet patch by the dishwasher — a known issue for months, mentioned in passing at team meetings, never logged and never fixed. The civil claim settled for more than twenty times the cost of the drainage mat that would have prevented it, and the insurer raised the premium at renewal. What hurt the defence most was that everyone knew.

One number

Slips, trips and falls on the same level account for roughly a third of all employer-reported non-fatal injuries in Great Britain, year after year, according to HSE statistics. No other category comes close.

Not sure this applies to you?

Walk your floor this week. If you spot something you have been living with, book a free 15-minute compliance check and we'll help you rank what to fix first.

This is general guidance, not legal advice, and doesn’t replace a site-specific risk assessment.