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Work-related accidents resulted in costs totalling almost £1.4 million in the West Sussex district of Horsham last year.

This is according to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), which is now urging employers to do more to reduce such incidents in the workplace, the West Sussex County Times reports.

The organisation says that 56 people had a slip or trip in Horsham last year, with a further 13 people suffering a fall. About 39 of these were forced to take more than three days off work, resulting in business costs such as sick pay and lost productivity, the HSE states.

'What these figures don't reflect is the extent to which these injuries affect individual workers and their families,' comments HSE principal inspector Russell Adfield.

'Slips, trips and falls can be viewed as being minor, funny accidents but the effects are not. It can lead to major injuries and a lifetime of disability or time off work and in worst cases fatalities.'

Last week, the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform released its first Hampton Implementation Review, which examined how well regulators work to clamp down on businesses who fail to comply with regulations.

They believe that while regulators have improved in this respect on the whole, they should do more to ensure law-breaking firms are caught and appropriately punished.

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