A great opportunity that slipped away

Andrew Stewart, Director of Slipping at Slipalert gives his opinion on the HSE Flooring Choice Tool.

The UK Health & Safety Executive has just launched the Flooring or Tool. It is supposed to help architects and building owners to “identify the types of flooring that are likely to retain their slip resistant properties.”

In the last seven years, far from helping prevent slipping accidents, the UK HSE’s bizarre policies on slip testing have helped rather than halted the year on year rise in major injuries caused by slipping. A flawed policy has helped slips to become the biggest cause of major injuries across the UK and NI. Despite all the evidence. This new tool was an opportunity to make amends.

The Floor Selector tool could have been a good way to improve floor safety, to publish guidelines for levels of slip resistance in all different flooring situations and to ensure all new floors are tested for slip risk. After considerable work and consulting with the flooring associations, you’d expect this tool to be a major step forward in slip prevention. Instead, the HSE has ignored advice, stuck to its flawed policies, and the floor selector is a bland tool that will not help stem the rising tide of slipping injuries. It has rightly met with scepticism and disdain by people in the flooring industry.

One of the issues in the UK is that guidelines on the safe level of slip resistance is poorly defined for all floor areas that might be wet or contaminated. For swimming pool surrounds or shower rooms or floors where the floor will normally be wet, the HSE recommends a level of PTV 36 (SlipAlert Test Value 136 STV). For floors that are normally dry, the HSE recommends the same value, but for a dry test. But what about areas of floor that might become wet? A shopping mall floor, or a sports hall, an office entrance, a coffee shop, a warehouse or factory where the floor may be wet or contaminated. Should these floors achieve 136 STV when wet or when dry? The HSE won’t say. It creates room for doubt when specifying floors, and it creates doubt in legal cases. The result... far too many slippery floors that should be safer.

In Australia, Handbook HB 197 provides minimum slip resistance classifications for specific locations making life easy for specifiers and for the flooring industry. The Australians recognise that  “transitional” areas do not need the same level of wet slip resistance as a poolside but they do need a safe level for wet slip risk because they might be wet some of the time. The HSE has chosen to ignore such practical ideas from around the world and instead sticks to its own antiquated approach. In the Flooring Selector when you choose the location of the floor it asks if the floor can become contaminated. Instead of telling you what level of slip resistance the floor must achieve when wet, it lists a number of flooring materials that might be suitable and some that might not be suitable. The Floor Selector is very general, very bland and very unhelpful.

Worst of all, when you look in detail at some of the many flooring types, the Flooring Selector gives out of date, or HSE biased information. The section on Resin floors mentions BS 8204 and Pendulum slip testing, but fails to mention SlipAlert the new British Standard slip test. 

The section on wood floors focuses on the micro roughness of the natural wood implying that this will have some relevance to slip risk, when they know that the surface coating will change the slip risk and that a new wood floor should be tested with a valid British Standard slip test.

The flooring selector may be new, but it demonstrates clearly that HSE remains entrenched in its flawed policies on slip prevention. The HSE has missed a wonderful opportunity to make amends for a failed policy, failed to listen to the flooring associations, and missed a chance to adopt best practices on slip prevention. It is a shameful wasted opportunity and in my opinion will prolong the era of needless slip injuries.

Andrew Stewart

Director of Slip Prevention

www.slipalert.com