YOU might have seen or read recently of how the owners of the Cameron House Hotel near Loch Lomond were fined £500,000 after admitting breaches of fire safety rules – and how a night porter was ordered to carry out 300 hours of unpaid work for breaches of health and safety rules that led to the tragedy.

The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 is the main piece of health and safety legislation which puts duties on employers to ensure the safety, health and welfare at work of their employees – and to ensure their activities do not endanger others.

Employers must provide and maintain safety equipment and safe systems of work and to ensure that materials used are properly stored, handled and transported. They are also required to provide information, training, instruction and adequate supervision of staff.

Employers are forbidden to charge their employees for training or safety equipment, such as personal protective equipment, and must provide a safe working environment. The failure of employers to fulfil the duties imposed upon them by the Act can result in accidents, injuries and even loss of life.

But employees, too, have responsibilities – to take care of their own health and safety, and that of other persons, to cooperate with their employers, and not to interfere with anything that has been provided in the interests of health and safety.

To take a current example, an employee who has been advised to self-isolate, having had close contact with someone who has tested positive for coronavirus, but who continues to attend their employment in the face of that advice, is arguably in breach of his responsibilities.

An employer refusing to recognise an instruction to an employee to self-isolate, is also arguably in breach. The potential consequences are obvious.

Health and safety regulations are enforced, for small business, by the local authority’s environmental health office, and for larger manufacturing or construction sites, the Health and Safety Executive.

Inspectors have the right to enter premises to investigate and examine. They have the right to dismantle equipment, and to ask questions of employers or employees under caution.

In the event that an employer is found to have breached its duties, a legal notice can be issued requiring a person to do, or to stop doing, something. The legal notice will prescribe what is to be done to improve the situation and will specify any prohibitions which require to be adhered to, such as the suspension of the use of machinery.

Employers and employees could also face prosecution, resulting, in the event of conviction, the imposition of unlimited fines, or even terms of imprisonment. In addition to criminal penalties, any person injured as a result of a breach by employers, or employees of their duties, may seek compensation and pursue the offending party in the civil courts.

Guidance in complying with health and safety legislation can be obtained from the Health and Safety Executive in Scotland. Further information can be obtained at hse.gov.uk