Tripped or slipped on cardboard packaging in supermarket claims

When you’re in a supermarket, you are owed a duty of care by the supermarket company to take all reasonable steps to prevent you being injured on their premises. The Occupiers Liability Act is the important piece of health and safety legislation that enforces this duty of care.

So what happens if you trip or slip and you’re injured due to cardboard or packaging on the floor? Can you make a claim for personal injury compensation?

Breach of the Regulations

Negligently leaving packaging and cardboard on the ground can be a breach of The Occupiers Liability Act which means you could have a successful claim for compensation against the supermarket. Any negligence of an employee of the supermarket ultimately becomes the responsibility of their employer – i.e. the supermarket.

Because the laws says that supermarkets must take all reasonable steps, employees leaving cardboard and packaging on the floor where someone could easily trip or slip can certainly be failing to achieve this.

Supermarkets should have systems and procedures to stop waste like this becoming a hazard on the ground. Staff should also be trained to not leave such hazards on the ground, but it can commonly occur – especially late at night when there are large deliveries coming in and staff are perhaps fighting to keep up with time schedules.

So can I claim?

If this has happened to you it is worth speaking to us on 0800 634 75 75 as we will likely be able to assist with a claim for compensation. If staff have left waste around that has caused a slip, trip or fall then you ought to have a good claim.

That being said though, the success of the claim can depend on the origin of the offending cardboard or packaging. If it ended up on the floor because of a customer, then whether you can win the claim or not can come down to what reasonable knowledge the supermarket had, or ought to have had, about the danger.

This can make a claim tricky. Most have systems of inspection and cleaning to spot such hazards and get rid of them. If they employ such a tactic, they can defend the claim on the basis that they have taken the reasonable step of looking out for hazards.

But either way it’s worth getting a claim started with us – we work on a genuine no win, no fee basis so we don’t charge you if the claim is lost. It doesn’t cost us too much in fees to get a claim form submitted to the supermarket or their insurers and see what their response is.

In some simple and minor injury cases they may just accept liability and pay out anyway.