Hi All I'm quite new to a small organisation (35-40 employees both staff and ops) and I have a query that I hoped some of you could help with. We seem to have an issue in our company with items of PPE and tools (hand tools) going missing. An example I'll give is, yesterday I was on site and one of our operatives couldn't find his wet weather gear. He said it was in the drying room but when he went to go get it, it was gone, and this is something I'm hearing quite often. This generated a lot of discussion on site and one of our Engineers was telling him that he will need to pay for replacements and that basically the rule is, if you've no PPE, go home, you're no use to me here, it's your responsibility blah blah blah. Now I understand that a company can't keep handing out replacement kit (£350 we're talking in this case for these 2 items) and people need to take responsibility for their kit, but lets face it, nobody wants to come and report to the boss that they don't have their PPE, so what was the guy meant to do?!? So the question I ask is, what's the best way of dealing with missing PPE and missing tools? I'm not comfortable at all with charging them for these items and I think the company needs to look more at the people with the sticky fingers rather than the ones getting their kit nicked. Any ideas?

Hi, Seems that management need to invest in secure storage for these, as an initial thought and surely you could only justify charging for PPE if it was the employees negligence that caused the loss, and not, as is in this case, the lack of a secure provision? Pete,