Responding to a safety incident – and beyond!

Welcome to the first of our Corporate Crime & Investigations team’s 2026 monthly series: “Responding to a safety incident – and beyond”.

An unexpected safety incident, no matter how serious, can be distressing and challenging to manage from both a human and business perspective.

To help you navigate emerging questions and to guide discussion within your organisation, our 2026 monthly series provides you with practical advice on responding to a safety incident – starting with the immediate short-term response through parallel investigations to potential consequences.

Immediate short-term response

In the immediate aftermath of a safety incident, the focus is on whether people have been impacted as well as finding out what happened – but quickly other emerging questions arise.

Are there going to be external investigations?

• Notifications to external agencies may need to be made. This could prompt a criminal or regulatory investigation. Understanding who has the responsibility for making the notification and what information needs to be shared is important for clarity and effectiveness.  
• You may find yourself subject to multiple external agency investigations which happen in parallel. We will explore which agencies investigate, how they can share information and their powers in a later update.

Do we need to preserve documents?

• You need to understand what “documents” you have before this question can be answered – it isn’t a yes / no answer.
• A “document” can be any record containing information. You should consider paper and electronic documents such as emails and other electronic communications (texts, social media). It may also include audio or video recordings and metadata (data about data).
• You may want to carry out data mapping to understand what is in your control that could be relevant. This is particularly important for ‘perishable’ evidence such as CCTV which may be subject to automatic deletion, or physical items involved in the incident, which should be quarantined.

How do we manage providing documents to external investigations?

• Investigations by external agencies can last years. You should consider how you collate and record what documents have been given to which external agency.
• Our Legal Project Management team has extensive experience in working with clients to design and run these work-steams. We understand that these processes may be time and resource intensive and that they are running alongside your day-to-day operations.

What else should we be thinking of?

• An incident is not investigated in isolation and there will be a number of interconnected emerging issues. These will often be specific to your business – but could include:
  • Continued business operations: Is the business able to continue operating? What steps have been taken to make sure a similar incident does not reoccur?
  • Data protection obligations: How can you comply if personal information is requested by external agencies?
  • Liaising with your insurer: Do you need to notify? What information do you need to share?  

Final thoughts

The key takeaway is that prevention is always the goal – but you should be prepared for how you would respond to a safety incident as well as what happens next.

We will be revisiting issues arising from this article in further detail as part of our series. In our next article, we will explore how one incident does not lead to one investigation, and how to manage parallel investigations.

At Burges Salmon, we bring in-depth health and safety expertise to help advise clients through the full range of issues arising from safety incidents –  we know that one size doesn’t fit all. We can work with you throughout each stage including on incident response, or on more targeted issues, and are well-placed to provide tailored legal advice that you can rely on and depend on at a critical time for your business.

We hope that you find the content of these articles useful and if you would like to discuss the implications of any matters discussed in these articles, please contact Charlotte Whitaker or Marie-Elizabeth Bailey in Burges Salmon’s Corporate Crime & Investigations team. To receive these monthly updates directly, please sign up to our Health and Safety mailing list by clicking the link below.