The hazards you already knew about

Why the most expensive incidents are usually the ones that were sitting on a register, waiting.

Written by Craig Davidson, GradIOSH, MIIRSM | North East Health and Safety

Published July 2026

In June 2026, Esso was fined £1 million after a partial tower collapse at the Fawley refinery released 2,400kg of liquefied petroleum gas over 33 hours. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) inspector summed the case up in a single sentence: corrosion of the structure had been identified many years earlier, but the systems to act on that information were not robust enough.

That is not a story about a refinery. That is a story about every business that has ever had an inspection report, an audit finding, or a defect note sitting on a register past its action date.

Known is not the same as controlled

There is a comfortable misconception in a lot of small and medium businesses that once a hazard has been identified and written down, the legal duty has been discharged. It has not. Section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires employers to do what is reasonably practicable. A document acknowledging a hazard, with no dated action behind it, does not pass that test. It often makes the position worse, because the organisation now has evidence that the risk was foreseen.

If it is on your risk register, your insurer’s report, or last year’s audit findings, and it is still there in the same wording 12 months later — you do not have a control, you have a paper trail to your own prosecution.

Three patterns I see again and again

• Inspection reports filed, not actioned. Statutory inspections under LOLER 1998 or PUWER 1998 generate defect notes. The certificate gets filed. The defect lives on.
• Audit findings that quietly slide. An action gets logged with a 30-day target. At day 45 it becomes "in progress". At day 90 it becomes "ongoing". By the next audit it has been overwritten by a fresh batch of findings.
• Near-misses with no closure. The incident is reported, the form is filled, the corrective action says "remind staff at the next toolbox talk". Nobody ever checks whether the underlying condition was fixed.

A simple test for your own organisation

Pick up your risk register, your action tracker, or your last audit report. Look at the oldest open item. Ask three questions:

• When was this first raised, and what was the original target date?
• What is physically different in the workplace today as a result of it being raised?
• Who, by name, is accountable for closing it — and when did you last speak to them about it?

If any of those questions are uncomfortable to answer, you have found exactly the kind of issue that HSE investigators find after an incident. The Esso fine is the high-end version of this. The principle scales down to every workshop, warehouse, office and yard in the country.

What good closure looks like

Closing a known hazard is not the same as acknowledging it. The audit standard I work to expects four things on every closed action:

• A specific, dated change to the workplace, the equipment, or the system of work — not a reminder, a memo, or a refreshed toolbox talk on its own.
• Evidence the change has been verified by someone other than the person who closed it — a second pair of eyes, a signed-off check, a follow-up inspection.
• A clear statement of what is now in place, written so a new starter could understand it without asking.
• A review date — because controls degrade, people leave, and yesterday’s fix becomes today’s open item if nobody checks.

The bottom line

Known hazards are the most dangerous category of risk you have, because the foresight test under Section 2 is already met before anything goes wrong. The Esso case underlines what HSE expects when known degradation is left to run: a £1 million fine, on top of the operational consequences.

Get your oldest open actions in front of you this week. Close them properly, or accept honestly that you cannot — and re-plan with realistic dates, the right person, and proper sign-off. That is the cheapest piece of insurance you will ever buy.

Need a second pair of eyes on what is sitting on your risk register?

North East Health and Safety provides practical audits, risk assessments and competent person support to SMEs across the North East, Teesside and beyond. If you have inspection findings, defect reports or audit actions that have been open longer than they should be, we can help you close them.

Call Craig on 07977 908 977 or email info@northeasthealthandsafety.com

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