Zurich employers’ liability claims defence hub

Employers’ liability hub

Welcome to our employers’ liability defence hub. Here you’ll find helpful resources and practical guidance to help you proactively prevent and mitigate employers' liability claims. It’s a valuable tool for supporting your colleagues, so bookmark it and check back regularly for the latest tips and information.

Proactive prevention

This section provides detailed example scenarios, what to look for and best practice.

Resources

This section will list the ways you should document and record an incident. It also covers counter fraud measures.

Support

There are a number of ways that you can access support.

What is risk management and why is it needed?

In this section, you will learn about risk management and how to mitigate risks.

Organisations face many risks that could cause injury or death. These risks can affect anyone involved, including employees, volunteers, the public, contractors, and trespassers. Risk management is the process of spotting significant risks to your organisation's goals, assessing their potential impact, and figuring out the best way to control and monitor them.

Good risk management helps organisations spend less time and money on dealing with accidents, incidents, and injuries. To get these benefits, your organisation will need measures in place to prevent incidents.

Duty of care

We must take reasonable care to avoid causing foreseeable injury or loss to others through our actions or inactions, including employees, contractors, and the public.

Negligence

Where that duty of care is not fulfilled, a claim for negligence can be made.

Statutory compliance

This includes laws such as Occupiers Liability Act and Health and Safety at Work Act etc..

The plan, do, check and act approach

To be effective, risk management requires support and commitment from all levels of an organisation. The government Health & Safety Executive (HSE) suggests a Plan, Do, Check, Act approach, which integrates risk management into general good management systems rather than seeing it as a standalone system. If you get risk management right, you won’t need to cancel or reduce activities just because they involve elements of risk.

For more information:

  • Create the policy to be put in place
  • Plan the implementation
  • Consider risk profile
  • Organise and then implement

Approximately 80% of risks faced by organisations are uninsurable

Uninsurable costs include:

  • Prosecution fines and legal costs associated with non-compliance with statutory requirements
  • Criminal prosecutions by the HSE - in 22/23 there were 216 criminal prosecutions with a 94% conviction rate
  • Damage to an organisation's reputation following a major incident or accident
  • Loss of key staff together with retraining and further recruitment costs
  • Resource costs - Managers/Directors liaising with police, regulatory authorities, insurers and lawyers
  • Stress and low morale of staff involved in an incident

In addition, pressures to provide a valuable service within tight budgetary constraints can also be intensified by:

  • Increased public awareness of rights to compensation
  • Claims companies actively encouraging employees and members of the public to claim for compensation
  • Increased insurance premiums as a result of a bad claims defensibility record

Claims defensibility

We offer services to organisations to help them manage their risks and, if needed, to support with claims defensibility for employers’ liability:

  • Health and safety consultancy
  • Training courses (including accident investigation, inspection regimes, risk assessment, and claims defensibility)