Can you still get 100% compensation? Find out here
Health and safety legislation is aimed at making sure reasonable steps are taken to prevent a person from being injured. There are regulations for public places, workplaces, and as a resident in a rented property. Whilst the regulations may be named slightly differently, they all share the common purpose of protecting people from being in an accident.
A raised carpet is of course a natural tripping hazard, and it’s one that is not so easy to spot when you’re walking around. People tend to look ahead of them, not at their feet. This commonalty makes hazards on the floor rather unnoticeable, meaning people are at risk of falling.
At work, we have The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations that addresses the condition of floors and traffic routes. It says they should be free from hazards that can cause a person to trip.
In a public place, we have The Occupiers Liability Act which states that all reasonable steps should be taken to protect visitors on the property.
So what happens if you do trip on a raised piece of carpet? Perhaps it’s a tiled carpet with a raised edge where it has come loose from the ground, or perhaps it has risen in the centre due to being moved? Can you make a claim for personal injury compensation?
Reasonable Steps
It’s normally all about what reasonable steps have been taken to prevent such accidents occurring. We need to find out how this has been allowed to happen, and whether there was anything that could have been done to have prevented it from happening before the accident occurred. This does mean that a claim can be tricky to win in these circumstances, because reasonable steps could be simple things to adhere to, like systems of inspection and maintenance.
If it happened in a supermarket, and the aisle where it occurred is inspected every hour or so, and the carpet was only raised in between inspection periods and it had not been reported, the claim can be defended very easily. The supermarket can argue that their system of inspection is classed as a reasonable step. Unless it was reported to them that the carpet was dangerous and they did nothing about it, they can show they have adhered to the law.
If you take the example of a rented property, it really all comes down to what knowledge the landlord had of the defect. If you reported the danger and they did nothing about it, meaning you were injured as a result, you could make a winning claim.
So should I claim?
Most definitely – because if they cannot prove they have taken reasonable steps, we can win the claim. We can normally only find this out by actually putting a claim in against them.
For many minor cases, the insurers may just accept liability anyway. The rules that guide claims encourage early settlements for simple cases, so they may just pay you out if it’s a minor injury case. If they do successfully defend the claim, we work on a No Win, No Fee anyway so you have nothing to lose by using our service and putting in a case.
