Let’s start a debate. Our site is fairly typical site consisting of offices, laboratories and out door areas including several car parks. Over the pass ten years or so we have had a number of incidents where ladies have slipped tripped and fallen. The fact that they were wearing high heels or narrow wedges may have exacerbated their injury. Is it time to ban such footwear in the workplace or would that be an unnecessary imposition?

I'm going with thigh high boots and stiletos....but I think that thread was removed by the Mods!

This is a difficult one as far as "common sense" is concerened. We have a similar situation, but do differentiate between footwear in what we term as "operational areas" i.e. labs and other areas , i.e offices, site car parks etc. In labs, it is risk assessment based, but mimimum requirement is "sensible shoes" that we have a description for. Even if the risk assessment does not explicitly require it, we support any employees who wants safety shoes. We use our behaviour based safety observation programme to deal with other aspects of employees wearing unsuitable footwear. However, we have ensures that pedestrian routes are well designed and maintained. So far, we have resisted on our UK site any limitations of type of footwear employees can wear in offices. In contrast, our US site does have a minimum footwear policy for all employees! (Heels higher than 2-1/2 inches, open back shoes with heels higher than 1-1/2 inches, and strapless sandals are not permitted!)

Have a meeting with the female section of the workforce, explain the AFR and discuss your concerns over the matter, and see what solution you can come to.

Thanks for the responses Our labs are not an issue and our office areas seem to be sorted- slip, trip hazards identified and controlled. The problem has been the carparks and paths leading to and from them. We try to maintain them and clean them but inevitably the paving sinks a bit and bits of debris (twigs etc) get on theses areas. If you were wearing a pair of sensible shoes this would not be a problem but some of our office staff like to wear high heels, wedges, and strappy shoes. They are happy to teeter along. But a couple seem to have problems staying up if there is even the slightest impediment on the paths. They are catching heels on slightly raised kerbs or even dropped kerbs. I have always had the attitude that our paths are the same as a public pavement and if it acceptable to wear these sorts of shoes on the public pavements we should let them wear them on our site. But we are getting worried about the number of such trips we have had this year, (5 or 6) where high heels etc might be a contributing factor. I asked our FM contractor to see what they could do to make the paths etc safer and they said that they were doing everything they could and that the solution was to ban these sorts of shoes. My instinct is to tell them to forget it but I am curious to see if anyone else has looked at this and what solutions they have come up with