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Compliance briefing
Your floor-safety duty of care
What the law asks of duty holders — in plain terms.
The general duty
The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 places a duty on employers to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of employees and of others affected by their work — which includes the public on their premises. Slippery floors are squarely within that duty.
You must do what is sensible and proportionate to the risk — not eliminate every conceivable hazard at any cost.
Floors specifically
The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 require that floors are of a suitable construction and kept, so far as is reasonably practicable, free from anything that might cause a person to slip. That is the regulation a slip claim is most often measured against.
Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, regulation 12.
Assess the risk
The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks. For slips, a measured Pendulum Test Value is what turns that assessment from an opinion into evidence.
Keep your test reports with your risk assessment — together they tell a complete story.
Care settings
In health and social care in England, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) expects providers to manage risks to people’s safety, which includes slips and falls. An accredited slip-resistance report is objective evidence that the risk has been assessed and controlled.
Wales and Scotland have their own care regulators; the principle — manage the risk — is the same.
Meeting the duty in practice
In practice, meeting the duty means: assess the floors that matter, measure them properly, act on anything that falls short, and keep the evidence. An independent, UKAS-accredited test does the measuring and the evidence in one step.
Assess · measure · act · record.
General information about slip-safety duties, not legal advice. For your specific obligations, consult a suitably qualified professional.