Is Near Miss Reporting A Legal Requirement?

The act of reporting a near miss is in itself not a legal requirement. The legality of reporting near miss accidents and incidents is more of an applied one via risk assessment.

The Management of health and safety at work regulation 1999 specifies that there is a requirement for risk assessments and a review of health and safety arrangements.

Near miss reporting feeds back into the risk assessment process and as such offers proof of continuous improvement and reviewing your health and safety performance to help prevent future incidents.

If you did not do this how would you know if your risk assessments were suitable and sufficient?

Near miss reporting can reduce risk leading to accidents or damage to property so if as an employer you have locate and identified risk and near misses it may be shown in a court of law that you have done everything reasonably practicable to protect your employees.

If you were an engineering manager and your maintenance team were working under your risk assessment on a piece of plant. Every now and again they activated a sensor that made part of that plant move but each time it never hurt anyone and a near miss form was not filled out.

Eventually, someone does get hurt and it’s the management structure that comes under scrutiny had there been a near miss policy in place along with control measures the incident may never have happened.

RIDDOR (stands for Reporting of Injuries and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013) State that there are classes of near miss that must be reported or reportable dangerous occurrences.

Examples of these are electrical incidents causing explosion or fire, overhead electric line that have made contact with plant or equipment, and the malfunction of breathing apparatus etc.

Regulation 12 of RIDDOR states that the responsible person should keep a written record of any accident occupational disease or dangerous occurrence which may come under the RIDDOR regulations.

To summarise is near miss reporting a legal requirement? The answer is no with the exception of RIDDOR but it is good health and safety management practice, and if carried out could show compliance with other legal duties.

If you would like to know more about near-miss reporting, contact us today where we will be happy to answer all your questions.