Your employer has a duty of care to take reasonable care for the safety of its employees. The general health and safety rules are set out within the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974. An employer has a general duty to provide:
- A reasonable system of work
- A reasonably safe place of work
- Reasonably safe work equipment
- Reasonable training and instruction
Employers must take reasonable care to protect their employees from foreseeable harm. This duty of care cannot be delegated to another person or organisation. This is known as a “non-delegable duty of care”. This duty is relatively easy to define when an accident occurs on the premises owned or controlled by the employer. But what about when the accident occurs when on another person’s or organisation’s premises? For example:
- A courier is sent to pick up or deliver goods and slips on the floor whilst off-site
- An office worker is sent abroad and trips in another organisation’s office
- A cleaner is contracted to work at an organisation’s premises and due to poor maintenance of the building, suffers a head injury from a piece of falling ceiling
In each of these circumstances, the employer still has a duty of care to ensure that the workplace is reasonably safe for the employee in question. This could be by virtue of devising a safe system of work, ensuring that the employee has available reasonably safe equipment, or providing proper training and instruction. If they fail in these duties, the employer could be found to blame.
In terms of the Occupiers’ Liability (Scotland) Act 1960, an occupier of premises has a duty of reasonable care to ensure that persons entering or exiting the premises do not suffer injury. In the example scenarios above, it is arguable that the accident may have been caused by an occupier failing to uphold their duty of care, then an occupiers’ liability claim could be brought against them.
Each case will depend on its own facts and circumstances. Points to bear in mind could include the following:
- The place where the work is done and under who’s control those premises are
- The nature of the building or premises concerned
- The experience of the employee
- The degree of control that the employer has even where it does not own or occupy the premises
- The nature and extent of risk assessment carried out by the employer
- Whether risk of injury was reasonably foreseeable by either the employer or the occupier
- The occupier’s system of maintenance and inspection
- Whether the danger was obvious or not
Regardless of who is ultimately responsible for an accident whilst at work, it is helpful if you report the accident to both your employer and the occupier. It is also useful to take photographs of the scene of the accident and take details of any eyewitnesses to what happened.
If you think you have suffered injury as a result of an accident at work, then please contact us on 0800 988 8082 or complete our online enquiry form and a member of our team will get back to you.
