H&S Bites 1: Capturing and acting on evidence of safety ‘in practice’

In the last 12 months, five organisations have received fines of over £1.5M for health & safety related offences.  Across May, we are delivering bite-sized thoughts on practical lessons from these cases, as well as some interesting trends identified by our Health & Safety specialist team, part of our wider Corporate crime and investigations team.

Key facts: 

• Biffa were fined £2.48 million in October 2025 after a worker was killed by a reversing ‘skip wagon’.
• Although Biffa had put in place legally required measures to separate vehicles and pedestrians (e.g. the yellow barriers around the perimeter seen in this HSE article), CCTV showed it was (what the H&S regulator called) “common practice” for individuals on site to routinely bypass pedestrian routes, including by climbing over barriers.
• Biffa pleaded guilty to breaching Regulation 5(1) of the Management of H&S at Work Regulations 1999, which requires employers to “make and give effect to such arrangements as are appropriate…for the effective planning, organisation, control, monitoring and review of the preventive and protective measures” (emphasis added).

Practical Thoughts: 

• The facts of this tragic case provide a reminder that health & safety legal obligations do not stop with the design and implementation of safety arrangements and safe systems of work. The law also mandates the control, monitoring and review of such measures once deployed in reality.
• As the H&S Regulator states in its ‘Plan, Do, Check, Act Guidance’ “Health and safety management is an ongoing process, not a one-off task. It is not enough to just control the risks in your business, you must make sure that they stay controlled.”   
• In this case, risk control measures had been put in place, but evidence of practice ‘on the ground’ showed it was common practice to bypassed them, and this was coupled with “a casual attitude to health and safety” and “a lack of monitoring and supervision allowed poor working practices to develop between the workers on site”.
• Organisations may capture evidence of departures from safe working practices and the development of suboptimal safety culture by a variety of observational or data driven means. These may including supervision, (potentially anonymised) reporting practices, site inspections, or (as in this case) CCTV.  However, it is important that organisations not only monitor data (and ideally capture the right data / indicators; something which is potentially difficult in practice) but then use it to inform action.  

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Read our next article in the series here: H&S Bites 2: Effective Risk Reduction: Using an evidence-informed approach and applying the ‘hierarchy of control’ - Burges Salmon

“Health and safety management is an ongoing process, not a one-off task. It is not enough to just control the risks in your business, you must make sure that they stay controlled.”