Legal Compliance

All organisations have a legal responsibility for providing a safe working environment for their employees. There is also likely to be a duty to:

• Prepare a health and safety policy statement
• Undertake risk assessments

Competitive Advantage

Risk management also makes sense from a business perspective. Apart from the direct costs of accidents and ill health normally associated with a rise in insurance premium, there are also significant indirect costs.

Research undertaken by the Heath & Safety Executive into workplace accidents has indicated that for every £1 recovered by insurance, between £6 and £36 may be lost as uninsured costs which tend to be absorbed into the general operating expenditure of a business.

An example of uninsured costs is lost time due to back injuries. On average, each injury results in 20 days off work.
The uninsured losses arising from accidents include:

• Product and material damage
• Damage to plant tools, machinery and buildings
• Construction and repair delays
• Time lost by supervisors and management investigating the accident
• Overtime working and additional temporary labour
• Legal costs
• Fines
• Loss of expertise and experience
• Time lost by other employees out of sympathy, curiosity and discussion

Employee Morale

Workplace accidents and ill health also have a negative impact on employee morale and may damage an organisation's image with clients.

Business Continuity Planning

It is important to realise that insurance alone cannot ensure business continuity in the event of an accident or disaster.
Even a small incident can cause long term problems if it is not promptly and effectively resolved. National Audit Office statistics show that 80% of all companies that suffer a major disaster never actually recover from the event.

Degrees of Risk is able to assist you with designing a business contunuity plan to help your company survive a crisis regardless of the type of incident, be it large or small.

If you wish to learn more about our capability or approach please follow the links in services.