Employers must comply with Health and Safety Executive (HSE) occupational risk assessments requirements – not least as failure to do so can form the basis of successful personal injury or injury to feelings claims, a lawyer has warned.
This followed a survey of HR experts representing 88,000 UK workers by Occupational Health Assessment revealing widespread ignorance of rules around mandatory assessments for employers.
The survey found four in 10 employers (41%) were unaware that a formal stress risk assessment was legally required to be completed by any organisation with five or more employees.
It also found a quarter (25%) of all employers surveyed had never undertaken a stress risk assessment.
One in every three organisations (29%) had failed to complete such an assessment in the last three years despite regular reviews of existing plans being a central component of HSE regulations in this area.
High payments
Melanie Stancliffe, partner – employment at Cripps, told Health & Protection where health and safety claims were made, HSE would routinely ask for and audit all risk assessments.
“It would come to light then,” Stancliffe continued.
“In an individual case it would be relevant to any grievance. It’s going to be relevant when those individuals are bringing claims because either there’s a personal injury or where they’ve claimed something else, bullying, harassment, some kind of discrimination, some detriment that they’ve been subjected to.
“What will you find is they will then say the employer didn’t comply with its legal obligations and the funds that are paid to them as damages, and any injuries to feelings, payment should be high.
“That is where I would tend to see it coming up.”
Not actively tackling issue
Magnus Kauders, managing director of Occupational Health Assessment, echoed Stancliffe’s concerns.
“Stress has been identified as a key component of employee absence in the 2020s, with the HSE estimating that stress, depression and anxiety are a contributory factor in around half of all working days lost to ill health,” Kaunders said.
“Yet our research suggests that employers are still not actively tackling this important issue and many are not even aware of the minimum legal compliance levels required of them.”
Steve Herbert, brand ambassador at Occupational Health Assessment, added: “More than half of our respondents (52%) were worried about creating a stress risk assessment. Yet in reality this is not a particularly complex exercise, albeit it does require a regular and persistent focus to yield positive results.
“Occupational Health Assessment would strongly encourage more employers to take the HSE regulations seriously.”
