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Wires – an obvious tripping hazard that can cause serious injuries if a person lands hard on the ground having tripped over wires, or getting their foot caught and falling due to trailing wires. When it comes to public places in general, there is always a duty to make sure that there are no tripping hazards so there should never be trailing wires.

In an office where it is workers that are often covered by important workplace health and safety regulations, trailing wires can easy lead to an employer being liable to compensate an employee.

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It’s an easy thing to happen – especially after a stressful shopping trip or if visibility isn’t too great. But if you are correctly driving along or you are stationary and another vehicle reverses in to you from a parked space and hits you, what are your rights for making a claim for personal injury compensation?

Normally the other driver will be held fully liable for the accident by failing to keep a proper lookout when reversing. It’s similar to a driver pulling out of a junction in to a correctly proceeding car. The duty is primarily on the driver coming out of the space and in to the traffic way to manoeuvre slowly and with great care – constantly checking for pedestrians and vehicles.

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Any tripping accident can result in serious injuries – especially if you land on a hard floor. That’s why there are specific regulations that employers must abide by in order to protect their employees from being injured in the line of duty. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 have a specific section dedicated to the condition of floors and traffic routes.

This section states the following:

(3) So far as is reasonably practicable, every floor in a workplace and the surface of every traffic route in a workplace shall be kept free from obstructions and from any article or substance which may cause a person to slip, trip or fall.

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If you’re expected to lift and carry boxes and packages around the workplace, the last thing you expect is for the packaging / box to suddenly break, causing a sudden shift in weight or objects contained inside to fall out and cause you an injury.

So what if it does happen? Do you have any right to make a claim for personal injury compensation caused by the incident?

All employers do have a general duty to make sure that you’re safe in the workplace. So if they have failed to take steps to look after you, or cut corners or do things that could potentially be dangerous, you may able to claim from their insurance.

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You’re walking along and your foot suddenly goes through the floor – stopping you in your tracks and causing an injury – what can you do about it?

Well you may have a claim for personal injury compensation if this has happened to you. We would defiantly be able to look in to a claim on a No Win, No Fee basis; no one expects their foot to just go through a floor.

Injuries caused can be widespread – whether you twist your knee or ankle because your still moving forward when your foot falls through, or whether your foot is badly bruised and grazed from the friction of falling in, this kind of thing should never happen. If it happens in a public place or a place of work, there may be a claim against those is in control of the premises / the employer.

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The Occupiers Liability Act is an important piece of health and safety legislation that puts a duty on those who are in control of a premises to take all reasonable steps to avoid visitors being injured. So keeping the place maintained is an important thing to do – allowing a place to fall in to disrepair and become a hazard would leave the owners of such a place liable to compensate any injured victims.

Some examples of slips and trips caused like this could be:

• From a piece of concrete or wall or roof coming off and causing a trip of slip hazard due to poor maintenance.
• Slip on a broken piece or section of fallen off tiling – these specifically can be very slippery.
• Injury caused by a piece of defective chair or table or other fixture that has broken off through ill repair.

So what happens if you are the victim of such an accident? Can you make a claim for personal injury compensation?

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If you are injured due to a leak in a roof, what are you rights when it comes to making a claim for personal injury compensation?

When it comes to claiming for this, there are typically three main scenarios – a leaky roof at work, in a public place like a shop or restaurant, or in your own rented accommodation. The accident is normally caused by someone slipping due to accumulated water on the ground as a result of a leak in the roof.
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Trapping a part of your body in a door is a lot more painful than you would think; sometimes it can even lead to amputations. Unfortunately, it seems that many children tend to suffer from these types of accidents whilst at school and as the doors in schools tend to be fire doors they are incredibly heavy and can cause a serious injury.

The first thing to point out, with these types of claims, is that they’re not easy to win unfortunately. It is only in specific circumstances where we may be able to assist clients in these type of claims on a No Win No Fee basis. When making a claim for personal injury there has to be certain prerequisites these are:
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As part of a compensation claim we can attempt to recover for any loss of earnings caused by the accident or injuries. This means that if you sustained injury in an accident and as a result you were not able to work and you lost earnings, we can attempt to recover this loss. This would be in addition to any general damages (compensation for your injury). A loss of earnings claim would have to be proved.

To prove a loss of earnings claim we will normally request copies of wage slips and possibly bank statements. We would have to show that a loss actually occurred in order to recover a loss of earnings. We can only recover the actual loss though –  for example if you were off work for 4 weeks and you were paid in full for 2 weeks and then paid half pay for the subsequent two weeks – you lost half of your pay for 2 weeks. If you have a set wage or salary then it is fairly straightforward to calculate your actual loss. If your wage fluctuates up and down each week or month then we would have to calculate your average weekly or monthly wage. We would calculate this using your pre-accident wage slips. These can then be compared to your post-accident wage slips to identify the difference (i.e. the lost earnings).
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When we are out and about in the street, at shopping centres, at the park etc, we are generally on property owned by others. The owner could be the council or local authority, equally a pavement in front of a shop may be owned by the shop itself. As a firm of Solicitors we can ascertain who owns a piece of land. This is often straight forward as we can submit a search with the land registry. It can become quite technical trying to figure out boundary lines in the real world.

However in the most part a land registry search will inform us who owns the land in question. We can then submit a claim to the correct party or local authority. The owner of the land in question (the street, the shopping centre, the car park etc) is responsible for making sure that the land is reasonably safe and free from defects. The owner is responsible for maintaining their land. If you sustain injury because of a defect on someone else’s property or land, then you have a right to claim compensation. This comes under the term “occupier’s liability” if the land is privately owned, or the “Highways Act” if it’s public / Council land.
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