Astutis

Our offices will be closed on Monday, 31st August, and will reopen as usual on Tuesday, 1st September. For urgent enquiries, please email [email protected]

Our on-call team will assist as soon as possible. We wish you a wonderful August Bank Holiday. 🌞

📊 A local council has been fined £6,000 after an employee fell from a faulty stepladder and fractured his collarbone and broke ribs. The Council had already identified the ladder as unsafe. It just never removed it.

Identifying a hazard is not controlling it. A known-defective ladder left in the cupboard waiting for someone to grab it in a hurry is not managed,

The HSE found:

-Ladders identified as unsafe but still accessible
-No training for employees on how to check if a ladder was safe before using it.
-No process for physically removing defective kit from circulation.

Falls from height remain the single biggest killer in British workplaces. But this one was entirely preventable. The controls are basic and affordable: schedule your inspections, remove defective equipment immediately (not later, immediately), train people to check before climbing, and ask whether a ladder is even the right tool for the task.

🔗 Read Brenig's full analysis: https://ow.ly/mQfH50ZBU08

🎯 Is the Workplace Safety Suite for you? You're large or multi-site, training consistency is hard, you juggle multiple providers, or you're growing fast.

You know how many people you've got, but you cannot reliably answer whether everyone is trained. That is when it makes sense.

Run your situation through the test in the guide: Do you train the same topics repeatedly? Multiple sites or hybrid teams? Juggle more than one provider? Use contractors? Have to evidence compliance to auditors? Growing or acquiring?

More true, stronger the fit.

🔗 Read the full breakdown: https://ow.ly/tj7t50ZCiVu

🌟 This week's Feefo Friday shoutout goes to Lee, who completed our IOSH Safety for Executives & Directors virtual course!

"The course lead was knowledgeable, engaging and provided a comfortable space for people to engage and learn... The breakout rooms provided an opportunity for us to work independently on tasks."

We love hearing feedback like this from our learners, what a way to end the week! 💛💜

Paris has just made helmets and reflective gear compulsory for e-scooter, Segway and hoverboard riders — after serious injuries jumped 33% in a year. 🛴

Private e-scooters are still illegal on UK roads, but they're on our streets, in car parks and on commutes anyway. So where does that leave UK employers' road-risk duties?

Brenig Moore breaks down what the Paris rules signal — and the questions every risk assessment should be asking. Read more 👇
https://ow.ly/BIEz50ZAuo7

Another week, another 5-star story from our learners. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Andrew gave his ISEP Foundation Certificate (Online Course) a well-earned 10/10:

"Cleverly broken down into 4 bitesize sessions with really good quality learning materials supplied too. Online tutors were very helpful and no amount of questions was too much."

Structured, well-supported learning that fits around your working week. Thank you, Andrew!

🎯 The Workplace Safety Suite has twelve accredited courses.

Asbestos. COSHH. DSE. Fire Safety. Managing Contractors. Manual Handling (plus risk assessment). Mental Health. Office Safety. Risk Assessment. Slips Trips and Falls. Work at Height.

Three are close to universal in most organisations: Fire Safety, Slips Trips and Falls, and Manual Handling. Beyond those, assign by exposure. Asbestos matters enormously in a maintenance team working on pre-2000 buildings and not at all in a purely office-based function.

All courses are accredited by IIRSM and RoSPA, which matters because it demonstrates your training was designed against a recognised external standard rather than assembled internally. The library grows over time — new courses and updates arrive as part of the subscription.

🔗 Read the full breakdown via the link below.
https://ow.ly/MnGj50ZxZlJ

💰 You know the Workplace Safety Suite is the right solution. Your finance director is asking what the ROI is.

Most business cases fall apart because they try to prove training prevented accidents that didn't happen. That argument rarely survives contact with a spreadsheet.

A defensible model has three tiers: hard cost displacement (add up what you spend across providers now — most organisations with three+ suppliers see this alone carry the case), administrative recovery (quantify the hours your safety and HR teams spend chasing completions and reconciling records across systems), and risk exposure context (HSE data on injuries, illness and costs — not savings you are banking, but the risk you are managing).

🔗 Read Brenig's full ROI guide: https://ow.ly/ReIm50ZxG75

🔌 All 14 travel adaptors tested from major online marketplaces failed UK safety checks. One carried 9,000 reviews. Popularity is no proxy for safety.

Multiple live pins exposed at once. Fake surge protection. Casings that won't stop burning. The same marketplaces selling holiday gadgets also supply your office, your site cabin, your workshop. And right now, the platforms themselves carry no legal responsibility for what they sell.

That's about to change. The Product Regulation and Metrology Act 2025 is set to introduce statutory duties for online marketplaces: prevent dangerous products, run due-diligence on sellers, assure compliance before listings go live. But you don't need to wait for secondary legislation to act.

Under the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 and the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998, any electrical equipment used at work must be safe, regardless of where it came from. A cheap adaptor from a marketplace listing that fails a glow-wire test isn't a consumer nuisance in your workplace — it's a fire risk on your risk assessment.

Treat procurement as the safety control it has always been. Audit what's plugged in. Buy from traceable suppliers. Check markings, but don't trust them blindly. Fold portable appliance checks into your regime. Tell your people why the cheapest online adaptor is a false economy.

🔗 Read Brenig's full analysis: https://ow.ly/ofQc50ZxFYK