Raising Safety Concerns: 7 Things Firms Get Wrong
Almost every organisation says it wants people to speak up about safety. Very few have worked out what happens when someone does, and fewer still have looked at the legal consequences of getting the response wrong.
That gap matters more than the policy language suggests. Health and safety is one of the few areas where an employee who raises a concern acquires protections that are unusually strong, that apply from day one of employment, and that in one important respect are not subject to the normal financial ceiling. For regulated firms there is a second layer on top, because you are already running a reporting regime for other purposes and the two rarely talk to each other.
Seven things firms get wrong.
1. Assuming this is a whistleblowing policy question
It is broader than that, and the broader part is the part with teeth.
The whistleblowing framework in Great Britain sits in Part IVA of the Employment Rights Act 1996, and section 43B defines the qualifying disclosures it protects, expressly including a disclosure tending to show that the health or safety of any individual has been, is being, or is likely to be endangered.
But there is a separate and in some ways more direct route. Section 44 of the same Act protects employees from being subjected to detriment on health and safety grounds, including where they brought circumstances they reasonably believed were harmful to their employer's attention, or where they left or refused to return to a place they reasonably believed presented serious and imminent danger.
An employee raising a safety concern may therefore be protected by two overlapping regimes at once, and section 44 does not require the disclosure to have been made in any particular form to any particular person.
2. Underestimating the dismissal exposure
The item that changes how seriously a general counsel treats this.
Section 100 makes dismissal automatically unfair where the reason or principal reason falls within the health and safety grounds it sets out. Two features distinguish it from ordinary unfair dismissal. There is no qualifying period of service, so an employee dismissed in their first week is protected. And under section 124 the usual limit on the compensatory award does not apply to dismissals falling within section 100.
That combination is unusual in employment law and it is not widely understood outside specialist practice. A firm that manages out someone who has been raising safety concerns is exposed to an uncapped award with no service threshold, whatever the merits of the underlying performance case.
3. Having no route that bypasses the manager
Need Expert H&S Guidance?
Our qualified consultants can help you implement the right health & safety measures for your business.
The design flaw that makes everything else more likely.
Most concerns are about the immediate work: the workload, the hours, the equipment, the arrangement someone senior put in place. If the only route runs through the person responsible for that arrangement, the practical effect is that concerns are not raised, and the organisation mistakes silence for safety.
A functioning system needs at least one route that does not pass through line management. In many organisations that already exists for other purposes and simply has not been connected to safety. Where employee representatives exist, they are also a route, and HSE's guidance on worker involvement sets out the British framework for consultation and participation.
4. Treating the external route as a betrayal
Employees can raise health and safety concerns with the regulator directly. HSE accepts concerns through its contact channels, and other jurisdictions have equivalents.
Two things follow. Reacting to an external report as disloyalty is precisely the conduct that creates a detriment claim on top of whatever the original issue was. And an external report usually indicates that the internal route failed, which is worth investigating separately from the substance of the concern.
The organisations that handle this best treat an external report as a system failure to be understood rather than a person to be identified.
5. Running two channels that do not speak
The complication specific to regulated firms.
Financial services firms, and many professional firms, already operate whistleblowing arrangements for conduct and regulatory matters, with defined governance, protections and record-keeping. Health and safety concerns frequently arrive through a different door, usually facilities or HR, with none of that structure behind them.
The result is that the organisation has a rigorous channel for one category of risk and an informal one for another, and the informal one is the category with uncapped dismissal exposure. Connecting them is generally straightforward and mostly a matter of routing and record-keeping rather than new infrastructure.
6. Missing the European reporting channel requirements
The item that catches multi-country groups, and it is not optional.
The EU whistleblower protection directive, Directive (EU) 2019/1937, requires legal entities above a defined size to establish internal reporting channels and procedures, with specified acknowledgement and follow-up timeframes and protection against retaliation. Member states transposed it into national law, with variations in scope and detail, and health and safety concerns can fall within the breaches it covers depending on national implementation.
A group operating in several European countries therefore needs to check entity by entity rather than assume a single group hotline satisfies everyone. Where employee representatives have statutory standing, their involvement in the design of these channels may also be required.
7. Recording the concern but not the outcome
The failure that surfaces later, in a context nobody anticipated.
Organisations frequently log that a concern was raised and never record what was done about it. That is the worst of both positions: documented awareness of a risk with no documented response. An investigation, an insurer, an acquirer conducting diligence or a client running supplier assurance will find the first half and ask about the second.
Concerns belong in the same register as incidents and audit findings, with an owner, an action and a closure record, which is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone. Periodic health and safety audits then test whether concerns are actually being closed rather than merely logged.
What good looks like
| Element | Weak | Strong | |---|---|---| | Legal framing | Whistleblowing policy only | Protected disclosure and detriment protections both understood | | Dismissal risk | Treated as ordinary unfair dismissal | No qualifying period and uncapped award recognised | | Routes | Line manager only | At least one route bypassing line management | | External reports | Treated as disloyalty | Treated as evidence the internal route failed | | Regulated firms | Two disconnected channels | Safety concerns routed into the existing governance | | European entities | Single group hotline assumed sufficient | Checked entity by entity against national law | | Records | Concern logged | Concern, owner, action and closure recorded |
Row two is the one to raise with your general counsel, because it reframes this from a culture initiative into a quantified legal exposure, and that is usually what unlocks the resource to fix the rest.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite helps organisations build arrangements where concerns actually surface and get closed, which is considerably more useful than a policy that nobody uses. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with finance and banking, legal and professional services organisations, where a second reporting regime usually already exists and simply needs connecting.
Where entities sit in several countries, our global health and safety consultants confirm what each jurisdiction requires of reporting channels and consultation, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current. If you could not currently show what happened to the last safety concern raised in your organisation, a free gap analysis is the right place to start.
Related Articles
Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
