You don’t have to look far to see evidence of the impact the new sentencing guidelines for health & safety infringements are having. In fact, you don’t have to look any further than the news on this website.

In August there was the firm working in Derby fined £500,000 and ordered to pay costs of £8,013.25 for lifting workers up on a pallet on the forks of a telehandler to work 11m off the ground without restraints or safety rails. There were no incidents or injuries. But there could have been.

More recently there was the report of a director sent to prison for a year, banned from being a director for seven years and ordered to pay £4,000 costs. His company had been fined £166,000 and ordered to pay £10,400 in costs. It went into Administration. In this case an employee died, crushed when a mobile elevated work platform (MEWP) he was trying to load on to a lorry fell on him. He had not been trained how to do the job, there was no risk assesment in place and no safe system of work had been created for the equipment.

Earlier in the year, Balfour Beatty was fined £2.6million with £54,000 costs when an unsupported trench collapsed and buried a worker. He was dead by the time he was uncovered. In court, Balfour Beatty said its company the man had been working for was dormant, but it was fined anyway.

In its half-year report, Balfour Beatty announced it had revised its legal provisioning levels for historical health & safety issues to £25million as a result of the sentencing guidelines. The sum was presented as a non-underlying cost because it is big enough to have distorted the Group’s underlying financial performance.

Balfour Beatty is not the only company making extra provision for fines, according to Tom Cleary, a lawyer and Partner with professional services provider Knights 1759. And with good reason. He says the average fine for a health & safety infringement since the guidelines came into force in February has been just short of £160,000. That’s more than a five-fold increase on the £27,177 average fine in the year leading up to 1 February 2016.

Tom was talking at the British Aggregates Association’s annual seminar in Buxton, Derbyshire, in June.

He said the guidelines leave the courts much less leeway in determining sentences. They have to take into account the size of companies, based on turnover, and the degree of culpability and harm. But note: harm is considered to be the potential to have caused harm rather than actual harm caused. A large gas company was fined £3million for a major gas leak even though there was no explosion and nobody was hurt.

The Guidelines include a starting point for the courts to work from in imposing a fine, and then a range for the fine to fall into depending on mitigating or exacerbating circumstances such as a company’s previous health & safety record and efforts made to identify and eliminate dangers in general. At the top end of the range, a large company can be fined up to £10million for each offence it is convicted of. And Directors who try to avoid fines by liquidating a company are finding themselves facing fines personally.

The point of imposing heavy fines is to stop firms considering a health & safety prosecution as part of the cost of being in business. The government wants the cost of a prosecution for endangering the lives of employees and / or the public to be high enough to make it worthwhile for companies to identify and eliminate hazards so they are not prosecuted.

Inevitably this has also evoked the law of unintended consequences by having also made it worthwhile for companies to contest prosecutions. Whereas previously most companies pleaded guilty if they were prosecuted by the Health & Safety Executive (HSE), Tom said more are now prepared to challenge the findings of HSE. This is increasing the cost of prosecutions as well as providing more work for lawyers.

If a prosecution is the result of someone having been hurt, these days it will almost inevitably be followed by a claim for compensation. Yes, the immediate cost of a successful claim will be met by insurance but it will have an ongoing cost to the company of higher premiums in the years that follow. It can be surprising what an impact an accident can have on morale of your staff and your public reputation as well.

The Health & Safety Executive is working with Stone Federation Great Britain on areas of specific concern to the industry. An area of growing concern to HSE is the number of unguarded or poorly guarded machines in masonry workshops and factories, especially saws.

Nobody NSS spoke to could remember a case of anyone being seriously injured by a saw in a masonry workshop but clearly there is a potential for injury, both from contact with a blade and from being hit by diamond cutting segments ejected, bullet-like, from a disc or wire. The loss of diamond segments has been recorded in other industry sectors, including concrete sawing, and in the stone industry in other parts of the world. But, again, it does not seem to have been a problem in the stone industry in the UK.

Nevertheless, Stone Federation is currently working with HSE on a guide to the safe use and guarding of machinery, particularly saws, which should be available from the Federation’s website before too long. There are other guides to health & safety on the members’ area of the Federation website.

Stone Federation has also run various safety & health awareness days (SHADs) in conjunction with HSE at members’ premises. The latest one was earlier this year at member Schlüter’s smart new training centre in Coalville, Leicestershire.

The main theme of the latest SHAD was dust – in particular respirable crystalline silica (RCS). HSE has been highlighting the danger of RCS for several years. It can cause silicosis, which can kill. If you want to watch a video of a sufferer talking about the disease and read a first-hand report of what it is like to have silicosis, take a look at bit.ly/stone-silicosis. It might make you think twice the next time you consider removing a mask.

The UK is leading Europe on the protection of workers from exposure to RCS. Before the Brexit vote, Europe was considering adding RCS to its Carcinogens & Mutagens Directive, which would have brought down the legal exposure limits to RCS across Europe to the UK level of 0.1mg in a cubic metre of air. Hard wood dust is already included on the Directive and joiners and furniture makers seem to cope.

According to Nick Warren of HSE there is no level of prolonged exposure to RCS that would guarantee nobody contracted silicosis. Even at 0.025mg, 2% of those exposed to the dust over a period of 45 years would contract silicosis. At 0.5mg, the exposure limit in the USA, 12 people will be expected to contract the disease. At the UK’s limit of 0.1%, 30% of people regularly exposed during a lifetime’s work would be expected to suffer from it. After 15 years, 2.5% would be expected to have it.

At the SHAD, Peter Griffin, an HSE Principal Health & Safety Inspector, said that in a recent study, when a group of stonemasons between the ages of 24 and 39 were asked to volunteer for testing, silicosis was identified in six of them.

It often goes undiagnosed for many years because it typically reduces lung function by 8ml a year (smoking reduces it by 12ml a year). An average adult’s lung capacity is 2-3litres, so it takes a while for a sufferer to notice they are becoming breathless.

There is no cure for silicosis and once you have it, it will progress. The best that can be hoped for is to slow its progress by eliminating any further exposure to RCS.

Stone Federation and HSE are encouraged that each time they have held a SHAD it has been over-subscribed, indicating the industry is both aware of and concerned about health & safety.

And for those who hope Brexit will reduce health & safety regulations, Ian Smart, the HSE contact with the stone industry, says: “Everyone talks about health & safety coming from Europe, but the UK’s regulations are part of UK law and it’s business as usual. There are exactly the same number of inspectors visiting exactly the same number of sites enforcing exactly the same regulations.”