Health and safety rights

Your employer must, as far as reasonably practicable, protect your health, safety and welfare at work. That includes assessing risks, providing safe equipment and training, and consulting staff on safety. You have legal protection if you leave or refuse to return to a place of work because you reasonably believe there is serious and imminent danger, and if you raise health and safety concerns. You also have duties of your own: to take reasonable care and to cooperate with your employer’s safety arrangements.

What your employer must do

The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 sets the general duty. In practice, your employer must:

• provide and maintain safe equipment, systems of work and premises
• make sure substances and equipment are handled and stored safely
• give you the information, instruction, training and supervision you need
• provide adequate welfare facilities such as toilets, washing facilities, drinking water and somewhere to rest
• provide personal protective equipment free of charge where risks cannot be controlled another way

The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 add a duty to carry out risk assessments, put controls in place, and review them when things change. Most employers must also write down the significant findings. Risk assessments matter especially for new and expectant mothers, young workers and people working alone.

Working time rules sit alongside these duties. The maximum average working week is 48 hours unless you opt out, and you are entitled to 11 hours’ rest between working days and a 20-minute break if you work more than six hours. See rest breaks and working time.

Your duties

You must take reasonable care of your own health and safety and that of anyone affected by what you do. That means following the training and instructions you are given, using equipment and PPE properly, and reporting hazards. You must not interfere with anything provided for safety.

The right to refuse dangerous work

The Employment Rights Act 1996 protects you from detriment (section 44) and dismissal (section 100) if you:

• leave or refuse to return to your place of work, or any dangerous part of it, because you reasonably believe there is serious and imminent danger you could not reasonably be expected to avert
• take appropriate steps to protect yourself or others from danger you reasonably believe is serious and imminent
• bring a health and safety concern to your employer’s attention by reasonable means, where there is no safety rep or committee or it was not reasonably practicable to use them

A dismissal for one of these reasons is automatically unfair, with no qualifying period. The test is what you reasonably believed at the time, so you are protected even if the danger turns out to have been less than you thought, provided your belief was reasonable.

The right is narrow. It does not let you refuse work you simply dislike or find stressful in a general way, and it may not apply where the danger is a normal part of the job and properly controlled. Paramedics, firefighters and police officers face risk as part of the role, and their protection lies in proper risk assessment, equipment and training. Professional codes also matter: clinicians have duties to patients that can limit when they can walk away.

Raising a safety concern

Start with your manager, then your safety representative or the health and safety team. Put serious concerns in writing so there is a record. Most public sector employers use an incident reporting system, such as Datix in many NHS trusts, and a report there creates a formal record that has to be reviewed.

In a unionised workplace, your union can appoint safety representatives. They have legal rights to inspect the workplace, investigate incidents and complaints, and be consulted on changes that affect safety. Where there is no recognised union, employers must consult staff directly or through elected representatives.

If your employer does not act, you can contact the Health and Safety Executive. A safety concern that shows a danger to health and safety can also be a protected disclosure under whistleblowing law. See whistleblowing in the public sector.

Common public sector risks

Risks differ a lot between sectors. Some come up again and again:

• manual handling of patients, pupils and equipment
• violence and aggression from patients, service users or the public, covered in violence and aggression against NHS staff
• lone working in community health, social care, housing and enforcement roles
• work-related stress, which employers should assess like any other risk
• infection and exposure to hazardous substances in clinical and cleaning roles
• slips, trips and falls, including on outdoor sites and during school duties

If you are injured

Report any injury at work in the accident book or incident system, however minor it seems. Some injuries, diseases and dangerous occurrences must be reported by the employer to the HSE under RIDDOR. If you are off sick, your employer’s sick pay scheme applies, and the NHS and some other employers have specific injury allowance schemes. A trade union can advise on any claim for compensation. ACAS can help with disputes about detriment or dismissal, and those claims start with early conciliation.