Most of us use the services of an insurance company not just for our insurance needs but also to carry out thorough inspections, tests and examinations of the plant, equipment and machinery which we have within the business, typically forklift trucks.
In a situation such as this imagine that the insurance inspector identifies that one of the trucks has a serious defect with its lifting chains making it unsafe to use. The inspector contacted you and advised that it needed to be taken out of service immediately pending corrective work.
A few days after the visit by the insurance assessor, you are then contacted by your local HSE office. They had been told of the faults with the forklift truck and wanted to know what was being done about it.
Why did the insurer reported this?
Regulation 10 of the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations states that the competent person completing the statutory inspection must do the following:
“Where there is in his opinion a defect in the lifting equipment involving an existing or imminent risk of serious personal injury, send a copy of the report as soon as is practicable to the relevant enforcing authority.”
Technically, the competent person completing the inspection should always tell you that they need to report the defects to the HSE but this doesn’t always happen. So we would suggest that if you are informed that any item of equipment or plant has a serious defect, ask whether it’s serious enough to be reported to the HSE or other any other authority.
Whilst its true that you can’t stop the report from being made, you can take steps to demonstrate that the truck was taken out of service immediately, that you have commissioned a company to complete the works required, and systems have been put into place to help prevent this happening again.
Remember
Your plant, equipment and machinery should be under a regime of regular maintenance to make sure that they can’t get into a condition whereby a serious defect report would need to be made in the first place. Review your recent reports and if you find that serious reports have been brought up before then re-examine your current maintenance arrangements.
