From the CEO’s desk – January 2026

THE SUPPORT of safety and health duty holders and employers in British businesses is fundamental to improving workplace outcomes and ensuring a vibrant and world-class British safety industry.  Duty holders are at the frontline where competency is required and important daily decisions make a difference to workers lives.  Supporting them will remain a central underlying driver of priorities for the BSIF.  

In their current strategy document the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) states that it is their expectation, and that evidence suggests, that “most businesses have the necessary skills, knowledge and experience to manage safety risks for themselves”.  This is a bold statement and presumably it did not include the management of No. 10 during the Covid crisis just a couple of years prior to publication!  It is clear however that HSE expects all duty holders and employers to be competent and the BSIF supports that aim.

In the HSM’s 2025 PPE Insights Survey respondents were asked whether they were responsible for acquiring their own PPE.  Bearing in mind that most respondents will have been professionals with an active interest in workplace safety, a staggering 24% said that they were.  Leaving this many individual workers to source and select their own PPE implies a significant competency gap managing risk in many businesses.

The reality is that Great Britain has 1.2 million businesses employing 1-9 people and a further 220,000 businesses employing less than 50 people.  Very few of these businesses have the resources for a permanent safety professional and safety duty holder responsibilities are usually taken on as part of a wider role by an ‘already busy’ person.  The role for education and support of these people has not gone away.  If anything, it has increased due to all the other pressures that businesses are under such as needing to improve productivity, adapting to new technologies and complying with more legislation. 

The first point of contact most duty holders have when reaching out for advice and assistance is very often a supplier of PPE or other safety equipment.  It is therefore imperative that these suppliers have trained personnel able to give appropriate advice and supply appropriate legally compliant products that will lead to the best safety outcomes for the duty holder.  Members of the BSIF’s Registered Safety Suppliers Scheme (RSSS) have their processes assessed annually and their customer facing staff are trained and qualified under the NEBOSH endorsed Safe Supply programme.  Their role in achieving good safety outcomes on a wide scale cannot be overstated and the BSIF will continue to ensure those standards are upheld and promoted widely.  

In many ways online marketplaces (OMP) are the exact opposite.  90% of non-compliant PPE tested by the BSIF in the last year was sourced from OMPs and the amount of misinformation we have seen on OMP’s, much of it dangerous, is very worrying.  The Product Regulation and Metrology Act (PRAM) has paved the way for secondary legislation giving OMPs the same responsibilities as a manufacturer for product sold on their sites.  We will campaign for appropriate legislation and the resources to enforce it.  Regulation without effective enforcement is counter productive and leaves unknowing purchasers at risk as well as perpetuating an uneven safety marketplace where responsible suppliers are penalised and discouraged.

We will also produce high impact video shorts and other easily accessible guidance to alert employers and duty holders to some of the blatant misinformation that we see online every day.

BSIF will continue to support duty holders and employers directly through the Duty Holders Membership Scheme offering services such as the PPE Helpline, Sourcing Safety training and technical guidance produced by the very active BSIF Special Interest Groups.  Having recently taken on the secretariat of Safety Groups UK (SGUK) we will also support and encourage networking at a local level as this can be hugely effective at influencing safety outcomes.

I believe the BSIF’s continued support of employers and duty holders will create pull-through in the marketplace for better products and up to date information which will make a significant contribution to Occupational Safety and Health in the UK.

John Hooker is CEO of BSIF. For more information, visit www.bsif.co.uk