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Working at height can be dangerous so you it is important to know about your rights and responsibilities.

What do Employers need to do?

It is up to employers to ensure that work at height is properly planned, appropriately supervised and carried out safely. This means that the planning, organisation and supervision also needs to be carried out by competent people.

How employers should avoid risks
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We deal with all types of work accidents, including accidents due to machinery such as a cherry picker. A cherry picker is an elevated work platform. It is also often referred to as a boom lift, man lift or basket crane. To put it simply it is a vehicle with a rising platform, to allow work from height.  A small or mini cherry picker may be used in a warehouse, for example to get to stock from a top shelf. A larger cherry picker could be the type we see on the road (a truck like vehicle with a rising platform like a crane). The larger cherry pickers could be used to get on top of buildings for example.

It is said that cherry pickers were originally designed for use in orchards such as to assist in picking cherries or other fruits from trees. This is where the name “cherry picker” comes from. Nowadays a form of cherry picker is used to help engineers service telephone lines; you also often see them on fire engines. Other workers such as window cleaners often use a cherry picker when cleaning windows on a large multi-storey building.
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Employers are responsible for their employee’s health and safety whist in the work place. Employer’s liability insurance is therefore required by most employers, so that they can insure against liability for injury and disease which has been caused in the work place.

Employer’s liability insurance is a legal requirement, under the Employer’s Liability (compulsory Insurance) Act, and is a compulsory requirement in the UK.

Employer’s liability Insurance allows employers to be able to meet the cost of employees claiming compensation for an injury sustained at work. Bodily injuries or property damage can be covered by Employers Liability Insurance, as long as this has been directly or indirectly affected by the actions of the employer.  Most large companies insure employees for between 5 – 10 million pounds, and employers must make sure they are insured with a suitable provider.
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Slips and trips at work, especially in storerooms, are fairly common. A lot of places lack the procedures that ensure tidiness in the workplace to ensure that clutter does not end up causing a slipping or tripping hazard to any employees.

The duty to ensure that the workplace is free from such hazards is your employers. If they fail to have good systems in place for keeping the storerooms tidy, or fail to enforce such a policy, you may be able to make a claim for personal injury compensation from your employers insurance.

Common examples of these kinds of claims that can be successful:
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When the government introduces regulations they can appear to be excessive in scope or “over the top“. However, they provide a minimum standard of health and safety which both you and your employer should follow.

What should your employer do?

Every employer should ensure that working at height is:

• Properly planned (including for emergencies and rescue)
• Appropriately supervised
• Carried out safely where reasonably practicable

When working at height your employer needs to make sure that the weather is suitable for you. Unless you work for the police, fire, ambulance or another emergency service.
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I’m going to split this one in to two parts – the first is if you are an employee who has been injured by a roll cage when working in a supermarket, and the second is if you are a customer injured by a roll cage in a supermarket.
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Building sites can be dangerous places, so it is not surprising that accidents are quite common. However, just because you work on a building site does not automatically mean that you should get injured or deserve to get injured; after all none of us get up to go to work to end up in hospital or at our GP later in the day.

Common accidents that occur on building sites can involve the heavy machinery that is being used (such as diggers, cranes and other such mechanical instruments), a lack of personal protective equipment for employees, and the acts of fellow employees causing you harm.

One of the most difficult things with these claims can be ascertaining who is responsible as it is quite common on building sites that several different contractors working (builders, joiners, plumbers, and electricians) and companies are responsible for different things.
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The Personal Protective Equipment at Work Regulations 1992 explained: Personal Protective Equipment, or “PPE” to those in the know, includes all equipment which a person has to ensure their safety at work. This includes any safety boots, protective eyewear, kneepads, safety masks, gloves, harnesses, life jackets and many, many more things.

How do I know if the equipment is safe?

The equipment must meet a basic health and safety requirement by the manufacturer or their representative which is applicable to that type of PPE. For example, safety harnesses will need to meet a set standard. Once approval is given, a “CE” mark must be presented on the product and maintained effectively.
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Working in an office may seem like one of the safer choices of career environments; but they are not immune from accidents and consequently injuries. Understandably, it is rare to sustain an injury as serious as one you may sustain on a building site – however, injuries can still occur. So here’s a couple of examples of regulations that apply more directly to office compensation claims.

Slips and Trips

Your employer is under a duty to ensure the working environment is a safe one and therefore trailing wires, open cupboard doors, spillages and piles of paperwork and folders should be managed to ensure they do not cause a tripping or slipping hazard and ensure nobody is injured. That is why on your first day of work you probably have to indulge a lot of paperwork explaining health and safety and what not to do.
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Manual handling involves moving objects or items from one place to another by lifting, pushing, pulling, carrying or lowering. It is not only, as many people think, the fact that something is heavy which necessarily causes injury, but it could arise from the way in which something was moved or handled. This could even occur if an object was relatively light by repeating the movement many times.

What must employers do?

Where it is reasonably practicable, employers should remove the need for their employees to handle objects manually where there is a risk of being injured. This could be achieved by finding mechanical solutions to reduce the need for manual handling by employees.
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