No win, lots of fees!

24 September, 2011

The compensation culture is about to be shot down.  Deregulation of marketing for the legal profession has resulted in shark-infested waters with everyone out to make as much money as possible from compensation claims, but things are about to change.

The Lord Young review started the ball rolling with the law changing so that the current feeding frenzy when someone cuts a finger in the workplace will no longer be the first option.

Currently the ‘no win, no fee’ offer offers injured

Questions clients ask

15 September, 2011

These are a few of the questions we’ve been asked recently.  As they tend to come up again and again we thought it might help more of you to have an easy check point to find out what you want to know.

As a small business owner, do I need to have written policies and documentation relating to health and safety?

The law says that if you five or more

Were the fire officers at Lakanal House risk averse?

02 September, 2011

It’s hard to believe that two years down the line there are still no answers to the Lakanal House disaster, in Camberwell, South London.

As a senior officer in the London Fire Brigade (LFB) I was involved in an investigation into a serious fire, in the East End of London, where two fire-fighters tragically lost their lives.  This involved internal procedures that had gone very wrong but it only took us three months to arrive at a point where improvement notices

Landlord gets huge fine for putting lives at risk

01 September, 2011

At the beginning of July Mohammed Javaid was found guilty of playing a risky game with his tenants’ lives. Of the 16 flats he owned six were considered to be uninhabitable due to the condition.

Mr Javaid chose to ignore the prohibition notice and not only allowed the tenants to remain, but moved additional people into empty flats and took absolutely no action to rectify the hazards.

These hazards included live electric cables right next to where people walked,

Personal Protective Equipment – why bother?

31 August, 2011

We’ve all heard people complain about having to ‘put all this kit on, just for a simple job’; that usually means that they haven’t fully understood exactly what the kit is for and what might happen without it.

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is not a case of the law being unnecessarily pedantic – it’s there to ensure that employees don’t suffer injuries or illnesses that can affect them and their families, potentially, for the rest of their working lives.

The PPE at