Astutis

Paris has just made helmets and reflective gear compulsory for e-scooter, Segway and hoverboard riders — after serious injuries jumped 33% in a year. 🛴

Private e-scooters are still illegal on UK roads, but they're on our streets, in car parks and on commutes anyway. So where does that leave UK employers' road-risk duties?

Brenig Moore breaks down what the Paris rules signal — and the questions every risk assessment should be asking. Read more 👇
https://ow.ly/BIEz50ZAuo7

Another week, another 5-star story from our learners. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Andrew gave his ISEP Foundation Certificate (Online Course) a well-earned 10/10:

"Cleverly broken down into 4 bitesize sessions with really good quality learning materials supplied too. Online tutors were very helpful and no amount of questions was too much."

Structured, well-supported learning that fits around your working week. Thank you, Andrew!

🎯 The Workplace Safety Suite has twelve accredited courses.

Asbestos. COSHH. DSE. Fire Safety. Managing Contractors. Manual Handling (plus risk assessment). Mental Health. Office Safety. Risk Assessment. Slips Trips and Falls. Work at Height.

Three are close to universal in most organisations: Fire Safety, Slips Trips and Falls, and Manual Handling. Beyond those, assign by exposure. Asbestos matters enormously in a maintenance team working on pre-2000 buildings and not at all in a purely office-based function.

All courses are accredited by IIRSM and RoSPA, which matters because it demonstrates your training was designed against a recognised external standard rather than assembled internally. The library grows over time — new courses and updates arrive as part of the subscription.

🔗 Read the full breakdown via the link below.
https://ow.ly/MnGj50ZxZlJ

💰 You know the Workplace Safety Suite is the right solution. Your finance director is asking what the ROI is.

Most business cases fall apart because they try to prove training prevented accidents that didn't happen. That argument rarely survives contact with a spreadsheet.

A defensible model has three tiers: hard cost displacement (add up what you spend across providers now — most organisations with three+ suppliers see this alone carry the case), administrative recovery (quantify the hours your safety and HR teams spend chasing completions and reconciling records across systems), and risk exposure context (HSE data on injuries, illness and costs — not savings you are banking, but the risk you are managing).

🔗 Read Brenig's full ROI guide: https://ow.ly/ReIm50ZxG75

🔌 All 14 travel adaptors tested from major online marketplaces failed UK safety checks. One carried 9,000 reviews. Popularity is no proxy for safety.

Multiple live pins exposed at once. Fake surge protection. Casings that won't stop burning. The same marketplaces selling holiday gadgets also supply your office, your site cabin, your workshop. And right now, the platforms themselves carry no legal responsibility for what they sell.

That's about to change. The Product Regulation and Metrology Act 2025 is set to introduce statutory duties for online marketplaces: prevent dangerous products, run due-diligence on sellers, assure compliance before listings go live. But you don't need to wait for secondary legislation to act.

Under the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 and the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998, any electrical equipment used at work must be safe, regardless of where it came from. A cheap adaptor from a marketplace listing that fails a glow-wire test isn't a consumer nuisance in your workplace — it's a fire risk on your risk assessment.

Treat procurement as the safety control it has always been. Audit what's plugged in. Buy from traceable suppliers. Check markings, but don't trust them blindly. Fold portable appliance checks into your regime. Tell your people why the cheapest online adaptor is a false economy.

🔗 Read Brenig's full analysis: https://ow.ly/ofQc50ZxFYK

🌟 It's Feefo Friday! 🌟

Jelena had some lovely things to say about her NEBOSH National General Certificate Virtual Course with us.

"What impressed me the most was the excellent communication and outstanding learner support."

Fast replies, friendly faces, and always happy to help — that's the Astutis way 💜

Thank you for the review, Jelena!

Safety at one site runs on relationships — the supervisor who knows who's due a refresher because he sees them every day. Add a second site, then a tenth, and that knowledge doesn't travel.

Brenig Moore breaks down why most multi-site H&S training fails: organisations standardise the core, skip localising the risk, and never build one source of truth for records.

His fix: build the training matrix by role and risk, not by site — and put one named owner in charge of it.

Read the full breakdown 👇
https://ow.ly/7qK050ZvGvp

Contractors on site can be one of the trickiest parts of keeping a workplace safe — and it's not always obvious where to start.

That's why we're launching the Astutis Live Expert Webinar — and we're covering a topic that affects almost every organisation with people on site who don't work for you directly.

📌 Managing Contractors: Practical Steps for Safer, Compliant Workplaces
🗓️ Tuesday 29 September, 11:00 am BST
💷 Free to attend

We'll be covering the practical fundamentals of contractor management — how to assess, select, plan, monitor and review competent contractors, grounded in the guidance and regulation, so you leave with a clear framework you can apply straight away.

Leading the session is Isabel Armstrong, Chartered Health & Safety Consultant (MA(Hons), DipNEBOSH, MBA, PGCE(M), CMSE®, PISEP, CMIOSH), bringing real-world, practical expertise to a topic that trips up even experienced managers.

This is a live expert session from Astutis — free, and built for people who need workable answers, not just compliance box-ticking.

👉 Register your free place: https://ow.ly/f04O50Zwrko

🏠 Awaab's Law Phase 2 lands 30 November 2026. Seven new hazard categories. One 24-hour clock for emergencies. And most social landlords are not yet ready.

From November, phase two widens the scope from damp and mould to electrical hazards, falls, fire, excess cold, excess heat, structural collapse and domestic hygiene.

The challenge is intake. Every hazard duty hangs off the moment awareness is established. If your call handler logs a smell of burning as a general repair instead of a fire hazard, the clock starts on day one, not day forty-two. That is where the liability sits.

Emergency hazards get 24 hours. Significant hazards follow a fixed sequence: investigate in 10 working days, written summary in three, urgent safety work in five, longer-term repairs within 12 weeks. The government's own impact assessment puts sector costs at £213.6m and explicitly says it cannot monetise all of them. Plan for the upper end.

Phase 3 follows in 2027, pulling in all remaining HHSRS hazards. The Renters' Rights Act extends these principles to the private sector. Your compliance infrastructure is about to change fast.

🔗 Read Brenig's full analysis: https://ow.ly/G4KE50Zv5CS