An Environmental Health Officer (EHO) made a health & safety visit to a large suburban pub-restaurant and noticed that the kitchen floor felt unusually slippery. Kitchen staff confirmed that the floor covering was much more slippery than the similar 'safety' flooring that it had replaced some months earlier. The slipperiness that staff experienced did not improve after routine cleaning and attempts to reduce grease deposits by improving the extract ventilation did not have an effect.
Tests by the Health & Safety Laboratory (HSL) using pendulum coefficient of friction and surface micro-roughness measurement techniques showed that the floor's slip resistance was borderline when dry and unsatisfactory if wet. This was not considered appropriate for a kitchen.
The pub management experimented with different floor cleaning methods to assess whether this could improve the slip resistance, but eventually decided that the most effective option was to replace the floor covering. Management made sure that the new floor covering had been reliably tested for slip resistance and that it would be expected to perform well in a commercial kitchen situation.
The replacement floor (a 'safety' epoxy material with anti slip particles) was tested by HSL once installed and the results indicated that it ought to perform well in both wet and dry conditions and when subjected to the sort of contamination expected in a busy kitchen.
The EHO was satisfied that the pub management had taken the right action to deal with the problem on site but pointed out that the action needed by the company did not end there. The pub-restaurant chain has a number of similar sites across the country. The floor covering that prompted the initial investigation was part of the standard specification used when their pub-restaurant kitchens were being refitted and had already been installed at some of their sites.
The company was left to review its own flooring specification standards. It also had to consider what needed to be done about its sites that had already been refurbished and equipped with the type of floor covering removed from this site.
Getting reliable information about the slip resistance performance of floor finishes should always be part of the design and specification process and is especially important where there is a risk of floors becoming wet or contaminated.
This situation arose prior to 6th April 2007 so the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2007 (CDM 2007) did not apply, although CDM 1994 did. Under CDM 2007, the Client has a duty to ensure that the finished premises will comply, in respect of the design and materials used, with the Workplace (Health Safety & Welfare) Regulations 1992.
The refurbishment project consisted of kitchen flooring replacement only: relatively minor works and thus not notifiable under CDM 2007. Where a refurbishment project is notifiable, the Client has a duty to appoint a competent CDM Coordinator and it would be the Coordinator’s duty to advise the Client on the health and safety requirements. In this case, as the project was not notifiable, the Client should have provided information to the Designers and Contractors.
In specifying an element of the design, a Client takes on the role of Designer and must comply with the designer’s duties under Regulation 11 (i.e. the design shall avoid foreseeable risks to health and safety; the designer shall eliminate hazards which give may give rise to risks).
In this case, the Client took advice from the flooring manufacturers without further research, genuinely believing it had selected a suitable type of flooring for the environment at a lower cost. Since the chain was embarking on a national programme of refurbishments involving several hundred similar kitchens around the country, the implications of suitability and cost were massive.
In terms of rectifying the current situation, enforcing the Workplace Regulations (through use of an Improvement Notice if required) is a straightforward matter. Under CDM 2007, the H&S Enforcement Officer may also choose to enforce design issues retrospectively, if it can be demonstrated that the Client knew beforehand that the flooring was unsuitable. Certainly, if the Client does not take the information on board and fails to change its specifications for the other pubs due for future refurbishment, enforcement action may be taken under CDM 2007 by the relevant local authorities.
The matter should be brought to the attention of a LAPS or LOPP Partner if there is one and may be brought to the attention of other LAs through various networking systems. For proactive action under CDM, advice should be sought from the LA’s local HSE Construction team.
Case Study taken from HSE Slips and Trips webpage