Can anyone offer any helpful advice on my seasonal problem!? My risk assessments for the business clearly hlghlight that open toed shoes/sandals or flip flops are not permitted to be worn on site. However, despite my very best efforts I have a plethora of deviant women who regular trot into work in exactly that! Sadly we have a management team that are scared of tackling these women, and I'm now getting a backlash from those individuals that do abide by the local regulations. Can anybody out there offer any pearls of wisdom? Any photos - Woman vs Lever Arch file? Anything!?

"Deviant women" - I hope they don't use this Forum!

OMG! I meant to put defiant! Thanks for the responses so far! I agree that it is a HR management issue, however my involvement is when weak willed managers refuse to tackle the issue and hide behing 'Elf n Safety as the reason. P.S. I'm a woman, and have never thought as flip flops as acceptable footwear for work, and I patiently await the release of Safety Slingbacks by Arco.

Don't know about safety sling backs but in various travels around the continent I have seen some quite trendy safety toe cap clogs and sandals (Sweden, France, Germany and Holland mainly during visits in the summer months) - all EN type approved! They also threw a real curve on a previous H&S Manager when a supplier employee arrived at site and put on a pair of the above (our stated policy was safety toe caps due to possible falling items) - one quick RA re-write and they were subsequently banned which was reported as nothing to do with the surge of internal requests received that July.

They are all wrong, and your policy is absolutely right. Where is the 'evidence', the objective reassessment, the thought that there might be some collective reasoning that suggests your policy is unnecessarily restrictive. What evidence have you got, that there is a real risk? Or is it simply another well-intentioned but unnecessary rule that can be relaxed or removed?

For a digression from the main theme of this thread, Wits End sounds like the quirky name of a small hamlet somewhere in England. Though there's apparently nowhere with that name in England, a quick delve on the internet reveals that there is a Wits End in the Drakensberg area of South Africa ! :-) Also, I guess that for some forum users this thread lost some of its allure/intrigue when they read at #5 that the plethora of women were defiant rather than deviant. :-(

Dudz: "your" risk assessment? You, alone, deciding? Company 'policy' is what the company decide. Collectively via senior management. You advise them on what is reasonable, and why your view would be no open-toed footwear etc. They then decide, because they have to enforce it. In most circumstances, footwear rules just for sake of it is not a viable approach. You will get deviations!! (even defiant ones). However, I have come across incidents involving the base of doors and bare toes. Not serious, and not usually as a result of a 'hazard' as such. Just a life situation. But painful!!! (I speak from personal expereince too.) My approach - give information, (eg as above), make sure creating no actual risk (mowing lawn, using floor polisher, moving & handling stuff, giving cycle training etc) where rules are needed, and then move on.