The UK's continuing skills shortages are becoming more than an operational challenge for businesses - they are increasingly a health and safety concern according to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA). In their recent report ‘Protecting workforce competence for safer, healthier workplaces’ RoSPA warns that workforce competence gaps are making workplaces less safe, less productive, and potentially more vulnerable to accidents and claims.
Why the issue matters
RoSPA's Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Skills Commission, working in partnership with Speedy Hire, has highlighted growing concerns around recruitment difficulties, inadequate training pathways, workforce retention challenges, and an ageing workforce. The report argues that current skills shortages are creating conditions where competence levels may struggle to keep pace with emerging risks, including new technologies such as artificial intelligence.
These developments are particularly relevant because workforce competence remains a key factor in accident prevention, risk management, and regulatory compliance. As businesses face increasing pressure to fill vacancies, the potential for inexperienced workers, inadequate supervision and reduced operational resilience may increase exposure to employers' liability and public liability claims.
Comparison to Weightmans’ data
Analysis of Weightmans' settled employers’ liability (EL) claims data over the last three years provides a useful perspective on the issues highlighted in the RoSPA report on skills shortages and workplace safety.
While the RoSPA report focuses on the potential for workforce shortages to increase health and safety risks, our review of settled EL claims suggests that staffing shortages are currently a relatively minor direct cause of claims settlements. Instead, our data points to a more significant and recurring issue: employers' inability to demonstrate and evidence effective risk management arrangements.
Our EL claims data over the last three years shows claims involving inappropriate staffing levels and insufficient staff to support manual handling manoeuvres each accounted for only 0.7% of settled claims. However, the data does support the article’s broader message around workforce competence, systems, and risk management. The most common reason for settlement was the absence of documentary evidence showing adequate systems, accounting for 28.4% of settlements, followed by cases where documentary evidence of employee risk had never existed, accounting for 16.1%.
The distinction is important: skills shortages may create the risk environment, but poor documentation often creates the claims vulnerability. For insurer-facing purposes, the strongest message is that businesses should not only address staffing and competence gaps, but also ensure that risk assessments, training records, manual handling assessments, supervision arrangements, and system reviews are properly documented and retained. Businesses should also ensure the systems are not only documented and retained but also trained on and followed.
What insurers should be watching?
Insurers should consider monitoring sectors experiencing acute labour shortages, including construction, logistics, manufacturing and facilities management and trends in employers' liability claims linked to inadequate training, supervision, or competency issues.
Another area to watch is increased stress, fatigue and mental health-related workplace claims arising from workforce shortages and governance arrangements around AI adoption and workforce upskilling.
Looking Ahead
RoSPA's findings reinforce a growing message: workforce capability is increasingly a risk management issue rather than simply a human resources concern. As businesses continue to grapple with labour shortages, ageing workforces and technological transformation, the effectiveness of their training, supervision and competence frameworks may become a more important predictor of future claims performance.
Organisations that invest in workforce resilience today are likely to be better placed to reduce accidents, improve productivity and mitigate liability exposures in the years ahead.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
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