Assessing the Health & Safety Risk to you and your Business
If you’re a business owner, manager, HR professional – or just generally curious about the risk you face from health & safety factors – you’ll be interested in the story this new campaign is telling you.
Business risk is a different slant on health & safety but it matters because, in 2016, the Government changed the sentencing guidelines for prosecuting health & safety breaches. As a result, businesses, business owners, directors and employees are receiving more and higher fines, with figures of £1m+ for bigger firms common.
And at the same time, prosecutions are becoming more frequent, with employees and directors receiving more – and longer – jail terms.
So in response we’ve launched our Health & Safety Business Risk Rank, which draws on official Health and Safety Executive and Office for National Statistics data to show the risk faced by businesses from health & safety breaches in every single area of the UK.
That’s 380 areas analysed, scored, and ranked, and it paints a landscape of distinct variances in the risk businesses face, depending purely on where they are based:
Some headlines:
- Blaenau Gwent in Wales is riskiest with a score of 96, while the City of London is least risky with a score of 7
- Wales has four of the top ten areas, but Yorkshire and the Humber has the most with five, with Hull and North Lincolnshire coming #2 and #3
- There’s an obvious north/south divide, with the riskiest places all north of the Watford Gap
- London has an average score (at 26.02) around half that of the rest of the UK: compare with East England (44.22), the East Midlands (56.35), Yorkshire and the Humber (71.94), the North East (47.12), Scotland (62.52), the North West (52.66), Wales (71.80), the South West (53.66)…
There’s lots more information you can drill down into, with breakdowns of your risk for three key metrics: Accidents & Fatalities, Enforcement & Prosecution, and Employee Wellbeing.
Plus, if you put your details in, you can also get a really nuanced report breaking down the factors that add up to the risk you face from H&S breaches. It looks like this (using the lovely Essex town of Maldon here as an example):
