In the area of personal protective equipment, there must be no subject as contentious as safety footwear. Employees, in the main, hate wearing it and employers approach the issue with some trepidation and uncertainty.

An employer's "general duty" to safeguard employees at work was further expanded in the Personal Protective Equipment at Work Regulations 1992 and Guidance on the Regulations L25.  It may be useful, at this point, to highlight some of the main requirements.

You should provide safety footwear, like any other PPE, only as a last resort, after a risk assessment has been carried out and you've tried to eliminate or reduce the hazard at source, then brought in all the other reasonable controls. 

The risk assessment must account for:

• the hazards, such as slippery floors, dropping heavy or sharp objects onto the feet, walking on hot surfaces, the presence of acids, solvents, oils, or sharp objects on the floor, or electrical hazards 
• the characteristics required of the safety footwear to protect against those hazards.

There is a big selection of shoes, boots, trainers, clogs and wellingtons with features in various combinations that can tackle some (if not all) of the hazards listed above. There are oil, solvent or slip-resistant soles, heat-resistant outsoles, pierce-resistant midsoles, anti-static soles, safety toecaps or water-resistant uppers. Your risk assessment should direct you to what you need.

Overspec

It's important that the risk assessment correctly identifies the workplace hazards and the footwear you choose has the appropriate safety features. For example, in too many cases, a safety toecap is specified where maybe the only risk is from slipping on wet floors. In this scenario, merely a non-slip sole would be essential rather than a steel toecap.

Many employees would welcome the chance to be liberated from unnecessarily cumbersome footwear. It could even be that anti-slip overshoes might provide an acceptable solution in some circumstances.  It sometimes pays to review the risk assessment and ask the fundamental question: do the hazards I've identified actually require safety footwear, or would occupational footwear be adequate?

It may be you can dispense with the  steel toecap and the opposition it often engenders in the workforce. Similarly, you could ask: could we make improvements to the workplace which would remove the need for safety footwear? In some situations, repairs to leaking equipment, or anti-slip surface treatments applied to troublesome floors may remove the need for safety footwear.

Of all our appendages, feet seem to vary the most in terms of size, shape, width and ailments/afflictions, yet some employers insist on dealing with only one supplier.  But even with ordinary footwear, different manufacturers' shoes have different "fits" - as anyone who has tried buying shoes by mail order will witness, so problems can arise when employees with feet of all shapes and sizes are restricted to just one supplier.

On the one hand, it's understandable that employers wish to avoid dealing with a multitude of different suppliers and to maximise the opportunities for discounting; on the other, employees reasonably wish to avoid wearing uncomfortable, ill-fitting shoes. A reasonable choice of suppliers can help to avoid this problem.

Free to roam

Some employers insist that safety shoes can only be worn at work, but what damage could staff possibly do to them when travelling to and from home, or what increase in wear and tear might justify such a restriction? They are hardly a fashion statement that would be worn 24 hours a day! 

Why not simply allow employees to use the shoes to and from work if it helps to make their wearing more acceptable?  Paragraph 61 of the guidance to the Personal Protective Equipment at Work Regulations 1992 would certainly allow this.

 It is not unknown for employers to pay lip service to safety footwear provision. They will quite happily allow an employee to sign a "disclaimer" when they decide not to wear it for one reason or another.

But where PPE is deemed necessary as a result of a proper risk assessment, wearing it is not at the employees' discretion. Indeed, under Section 7 of the Health and Safety at Work Act (HSW Act), they are obliged to cooperate with their employers.

A more difficult situation arises when the employee claims "medical exemption", but this should always be supported by a doctor's certificate and the legal position checked with insurers/lawyers. Very often, however, this problem can be avoided by allowing employees a sufficiently wide choice of footwear as described earlier.

HSW has covered how to cope when employees refuse to wear PPE in detail in a previous article, see Refusal to wear PPE

If the safety footwear has been provided by the employer as a result of a risk assessment then Section 9 of the HSW Act prevents any charge being made
for them.

In the same way, an employee would not be expected to pay for goggles or facemasks. Some employers try to hide behind the false logic of: "You can only have them if you pay for them". But that would put them on very unsound legal ground.

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Standard issue

• EN ISO20345: 2004 deals with safety footwear and specifies a standard of 200 joules impact resistance (equivalent to a 20kg weight dropped 1020mm onto the toes), and a 15KN compression test (equivalent to 1.5 tonnes resting on the toe area).
• EN ISO 20346:2004 deals with protective footwear  and specifies a lesser standard of 100 joules impact resistance, and a 10KN compression test.
• EN ISO 20347:2004 deals with occupational footwear which can have many of the features of safety and / or protective footwear but without the safety toecap.
  

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Phil Dryden MCIEH is principal consultant at the European Safety Bureau, www.esb.eu.com