What Is an Employer’s Duty of Care?

Most people reading this page are not ready to call a solicitor yet. They are trying to understand their position — to make sense of what happened at work before deciding what to do next. That is a reasonable starting point. This page explains what the law requires every UK employer to do, what changes when those requirements are not met, and what the options are for an employee who has been injured as a result.

What Is an Employer’s Duty of Care?

An employer’s duty of care is the legal obligation every UK employer owes to every person they employ. Under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, employers must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare of their employees at work. This obligation is not optional and it does not depend on the size of the company. A sole trader with one employee carries exactly the same duty of care as a national organisation with ten thousand. At common law, the duty has been recognised since at least Wilsons & Clyde Coal Co v English [1938] AC 57, where the House of Lords identified four non-negotiable employer obligations: a safe place of work, safe equipment, a safe system of work, and competent fellow employees.

The legal standard is “reasonable care” — not the elimination of every conceivable risk, but the active taking of all steps a reasonable employer would take in the same circumstances. This duty extends to physical safety, psychological wellbeing, protection from bullying, harassment, and discrimination, and reasonable adjustments where a health condition is known. It applies from the first day of employment and covers all contract types — full-time, part-time, zero-hours, agency, and fixed-term employees are all owed the same duty by the employer responsible for their working conditions.

The Legal Foundation: Where This Duty Comes From

The employer’s duty of care has two distinct legal sources, and both matter when a workplace injury leads to a claim. The first is statute. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 (HASAWA) imposes a general duty on all employers. Regulations made under HASAWA then set specific standards in particular contexts — the Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992, the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998, the Personal Protective Equipment at Work Regulations 1992, and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 among them. These regulations set the detailed benchmarks a reasonable employer is expected to meet.

The second source is the common law. In Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562, the House of Lords established the foundational principle that a person owes a duty of care to anyone who could foreseeably be harmed by their acts or omissions. The employer-employee relationship satisfies this test without question. Wilsons & Clyde Coal Co v English [1938] then refined this into the four specific employer obligations that remain the starting point for every workplace injury claim today.

There is one change in the law that most accounts of this topic do not mention, and it matters for anyone injured at work after 1 October 2013. Before that date, an employee could bring a civil claim by pointing directly to a breach of a specific health and safety regulation — the breach of the regulation itself was enough to establish liability. The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, section 69, removed this. For accidents after October 2013, virtually all workplace injury claims must now be brought in common law negligence rather than statutory breach. The regulations remain highly relevant — they are powerful evidence of what a reasonable employer should have done — but they no longer create automatic civil liability on their own. This is why a claim that might look weak when assessed only against a specific regulation can still succeed in negligence, and why a solicitor who says “you can’t claim because no specific rule was technically broken” may not be telling the full story.

What Does the Duty of Care Actually Require?

In practical terms, the Health and Safety at Work Act requires every employer to take a set of overlapping steps to protect the people who work for them. The workplace itself must be safe — properly maintained, adequately lit, appropriately ventilated, and free from structural hazards. Equipment must be suitable for its purpose, regularly inspected, and in good working order. Where a task carries a significant risk of injury, the employer must carry out a risk assessment, put preventive measures in place, and monitor whether those measures are working. Where a task requires a particular skill or knowledge, sufficient training and supervision must be provided before the employee carries it out — including refresher training when working practices or equipment change.

Personal protective equipment — gloves, goggles, safety footwear, high-visibility clothing, respiratory protection — must be provided free of charge wherever the nature of the work makes it necessary. The employer cannot ask an employee to fund their own PPE, and an employee cannot be expected to work without it in circumstances where a risk assessment has identified the need.

Critically, the duty extends to mental health and psychological wellbeing in exactly the same way it applies to physical safety. An employer who knows — or ought reasonably to know — that excessive workload, unrealistic deadlines, workplace bullying, harassment, or victimisation is causing psychological harm has a legal obligation to act on it. Stress-related illness, anxiety, and depression caused by working conditions are compensable in the same way as a physical injury, provided the employer’s failure to address the known risk can be demonstrated. The accident at work claims framework covers both.

The standard is always proportionate. A higher risk of harm creates a correspondingly higher obligation to act. A construction site employer faces more demanding requirements than an office employer because the foreseeable consequences of failure are more severe. If preventing a known risk requires only a modest investment of time or money relative to the harm it would prevent, the employer is expected to make it.

The Three-Part Test: What Every Workplace Injury Claim Must Prove

Understanding whether an employer has breached their duty of care is only part of the picture. For a workplace injury claim to succeed, three separate legal requirements must all be established — in sequence. Each one depends on the previous. Miss any one of them and the claim fails regardless of how clearly the others are proven. This is the structure that every workplace injury solicitor applies from the first call, and it is the framework that determines whether a case has merit before any letter is written or any evidence gathered.

It is the third element — causation — that catches people out most often, and that insurers focus on most heavily when defending a claim. The causation test asks a specific question: would the injury have happened even if the employer had done everything right? If the answer is yes, the claim fails at that point regardless of how clear the breach is. If the answer is no — if a properly trained employee, with the right equipment, in a properly risk-assessed environment would not have been injured in that way — then causation is established and the claim has its legal foundation.

What Does a Breach of Duty Actually Look Like?

A breach of the duty of care occurs when an employer’s conduct falls below the standard of the “reasonably prudent employer” — as the courts defined it in Stokes v Guest, Keen and Nettlefold Ltd [1968]. That is not a theoretical standard. It asks what a real employer in the same industry, with the same knowledge of the risks, would have done to prevent the injury. The higher the foreseeable risk, the more the reasonable employer would have invested in preventing it.

In practice, breaches take predictable forms — and the five most common are worth understanding in detail, because they are the ones insurers encounter most often and know how to challenge. The panel below covers each one.

What matters is whether the employer ought reasonably to have foreseen the category of risk and taken steps to address it. An employer who ignored repeated reports of a slippery warehouse floor because nobody had been seriously hurt yet is not protected by the absence of a prior injury — the foreseeability of harm existed from the first report.

The Rule That Cannot Be Contracted Away: This Duty Cannot Be Delegated

One of the most practically important — and most frequently misunderstood — aspects of employer’s liability law is that the duty of care is non-delegable. This means that an employer cannot transfer or pass on their legal responsibility for an employee’s safety to anyone else — not to a contractor, not to a health and safety consultancy, not to a third-party site manager, and not to any other person or organisation. The legal obligation remains with the employer regardless of who was physically running the operation at the time of the accident.

The principle was authoritatively established in McDermid v Nash Dredging and Reclamation Co Ltd [1987] AC 906. A dock hand employed by a UK company was working on a tug operated by a Dutch company. The Dutch captain — to whom safety responsibilities had in practice been delegated — failed to follow the safe system of work he had himself put in place, and the dock hand was seriously injured. The House of Lords held the UK employer fully liable. The duty to devise and maintain a safe system of work was a core obligation of the employer that could not be discharged simply because someone else had been given day-to-day control. More recently, the Court of Appeal confirmed in Uren v Corporate Leisure UK Ltd [2011] that even the specific obligation to carry out a risk assessment is non-delegable — an employer cannot escape liability by arguing that a contractor was supposed to conduct the assessment and failed to do so properly.

This matters in a very practical way. When an insurer is defending a workplace injury claim, one of the arguments sometimes used is that the responsible party was not the employer but a third-party contractor — a facilities company, a scaffolding firm, a labour provider, or an outsourced health and safety service. Where the non-delegable duty applies, that argument has significant legal limitations. An injured employee’s claim against their own employer is not automatically defeated because a contractor was also at fault. Both may be liable. The question of which insurer pays and in what proportion is a matter between the defendants, not a hurdle the injured person needs to clear before pursuing a claim. If the employer was your employer and you were injured at work, the duty of care ran to you — and it ran directly, without anyone else being able to stand in its way.

When a Colleague’s Negligence Becomes Your Employer’s Responsibility

Not every workplace injury is caused directly by a failure of systems, equipment, or training. Sometimes an injury is caused by the negligence of a fellow employee — a colleague who drives carelessly during a delivery run, who operates machinery without following the procedure they were taught, or who handles hazardous materials in a way that puts others at risk. In those situations, the injured person is not without a remedy simply because it was a co-worker who caused the harm rather than the employer directly.

Put simply: if a colleague injures you while doing their job, your employer is responsible — even if they had nothing personally to do with it. The legal name for this is vicarious liability. An employer who benefits from an employee’s work also carries the legal risk of the harm that employee causes while doing it. They do not need to have instructed the colleague to act carelessly, and they do not need to have been aware of the specific risk beforehand. If the negligent act happened in the course of employment, the employer is liable for the consequences.

This is significant for injured workers because it means the right target for a compensation claim is the employer — specifically, the employer’s liability insurers — rather than the individual colleague who caused the accident. Employers are legally required to hold employers’ liability insurance under the Employers’ Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969. That insurance exists precisely to ensure that injured employees can be compensated without the outcome depending on whether an individual colleague has personal means to meet a judgment. The colleague’s fault triggers the claim; the employer’s insurance meets it.

If You Think Your Employer’s Duty of Care Has Been Breached

The steps taken immediately after a workplace accident or injury have a direct bearing on the strength of any subsequent claim. Evidence degrades quickly — CCTV footage is routinely overwritten within days, witnesses move on, and physical conditions change. The three-year time limit under the Limitation Act 1980 can feel generous, but the practical window for gathering the strongest evidence is much shorter than that.

Report the accident in writing to your employer as soon as possible, and ensure it is recorded in the workplace accident book — this is a legal requirement in workplaces with ten or more employees.

Consulting a specialist solicitor at an early stage does not mean committing to a claim. It means understanding whether the three-part test can be met — whether there is a duty, whether there appears to be a breach, and whether that breach caused this specific injury. A clear, honest early assessment of those questions is worth more than months of uncertainty. Most accident at work claims are handled on a No Win No Fee basis, which means the financial risk of taking advice is nil.

People Also Ask

Frequently Asked Questions About Employer’s Duty of Care Claims

Related Essential Guides

Understanding the duty of care is the foundation. These guides cover what comes next — how claims are valued, what evidence is needed, and what your employment rights are while a claim is underway.

Or return to the accident at work claims hub for the complete guide to making a workplace injury claim.

Employer’s Duty of Care Solicitors Serving Clients Across England and Wales

Carter & Carter’s head office is in Whaley Bridge, Derbyshire, on the edge of the Peak District. The firm handles accident at work claims for clients across England and Wales. Every claim is managed remotely. You do not need to travel to the office.

The nearest county court with a personal injury track is Manchester County Court. When court proceedings are issued, they are issued there regardless of where in England and Wales the client is based. The process is the same for a client in London as it is for a client in Manchester.

Two senior solicitors. Chris Carter, qualified in 1993. David Healey, qualified in 2005. 54 years of combined personal injury experience. 33 years of doing four things properly, wherever you are based.

Page last reviewed: April 2026. Carter & Carter Solicitors. This page provides general legal information about employer’s duty of care in England and Wales. It does not constitute legal advice. Every claim turns on its own facts — speak to a qualified solicitor to understand your specific position.