Read through a month of HSE prosecution notices and a pattern emerges quickly. Someone reached into a machine that was still running. A guard had been removed, defeated, or was never adequate for the task in the first place. A hand, a finger, or an arm was caught. The company was prosecuted under Regulation 11 of the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998.
It is among the most well-understood requirements in health and safety law and among the most frequently breached. Understanding why is more useful than restating the rule.
What Regulation 11 requires
Regulation 11(1) of PUWER requires every employer to ensure that measures are taken which are effective:
- to prevent access to any dangerous part of machinery or to any rotating stock-bar; or
- to stop the movement of any dangerous part of machinery or rotating stock-bar before any part of a person enters a danger zone.
Regulation 11(2) then sets out a hierarchy, and this is the part that matters most in practice. Measures must consist of, in descending order of preference:
- Fixed enclosing guards, where and to the extent that it is practicable.
- Other guards or protection devices — interlocked guards, two-hand controls, trip devices, light curtains, pressure-sensitive mats — where and to the extent that fixed guards are not practicable.
- Jigs, holders, push-sticks and similar protection appliances used in conjunction with the machinery.
- The provision of information, instruction, training and supervision.
The hierarchy is not advisory. You may only move down a level to the extent that the level above is not practicable. Note that PUWER Regulation 11 uses “practicable” rather than “reasonably practicable” — a stricter test, in which cost is not a balancing factor in the same way. If a fixed guard is technically feasible for the task, the fact that it would be inconvenient or slow production is not a defence.
A workplace that relies on training and supervision to keep people out of a danger zone, where a fixed or interlocked guard could have been fitted, has almost certainly breached the hierarchy.
Why guards fail
Very few prosecutions involve a machine that never had a guard. The failures cluster around a small number of recognisable situations.
Maintenance, setting and cleaning
This is the single biggest category. Guards are designed around normal production. They are then removed to clear a blockage, change a tool, clean down at end of shift, or diagnose a fault — and the safe system of work for that task either does not exist or is not followed.
If your PUWER assessment covers the machine in production mode only, it covers perhaps 80% of the risk and misses the part where most injuries happen. Every machine needs the non-production tasks assessed explicitly: what is the safe method for clearing a jam, and does it require isolation and lock-off?
Defeated interlocks
Interlocks get defeated because they slow something down. A spare actuator key taped to the frame, a magnetic switch held closed with a magnet, a proximity sensor packed out with a washer.
When this is found, the immediate response is often disciplinary. The more useful response is to ask why. An interlock that is routinely defeated is usually one that makes a legitimate and frequent task unreasonably difficult. The fix is to design that task in, not solely to enforce against the workaround.
Modification without reassessment
A machine is moved, a new infeed conveyor is added, a hopper is enlarged, an operator platform is built to improve access. Each change is sensible in isolation. Collectively they create a new access point that no risk assessment has ever considered.
Any physical modification to work equipment, or to how it is arranged relative to other equipment, should trigger a review of the guarding assessment.
Second-hand and legacy equipment
Older machinery bought at auction or inherited with a site acquisition frequently arrives with guarding that was adequate to a previous standard, or with guards missing entirely. PUWER applies to the equipment you are using now, regardless of its age or where it came from. A CE or UKCA mark on a 1990s machine does not discharge your duty to assess it in your context, for your task, with your operators.
Guards that do not actually work
A fixed guard with a gap large enough to reach through. An interlocked gate that can be opened before dangerous motion has stopped, because run-down time was never measured against the guard’s stopping performance. A light curtain mounted at a distance that does not account for the machine’s stopping time and the approach speed of a hand.
These are engineering questions with defined standards behind them — BS EN ISO 13857 for safety distances, BS EN ISO 13855 for the positioning of protective equipment relative to approach speeds, BS EN ISO 14119 for interlocking devices. A visual check that “there’s a guard on it” does not test any of this.
What it costs when it goes wrong
In July 2026, Easy Cleaning Solutions Ltd of Thetford was fined £100,000 with £6,468.18 in costs at Norwich Magistrates’ Court. In April 2024, a worker at the site had been removing a cardboard box from a running conveyor when their hand was drawn into unguarded machinery. They suffered a broken finger and bruising to three other fingers, required surgery, and were off work for six weeks. The company was prosecuted under Regulation 11(1) of PUWER. HSE inspector Paul Shackleton described it as “a wholly avoidable incident caused by the failure to guard dangerous parts of machinery.”
Fine levels follow the Sentencing Council’s definitive guideline, which sets the starting point from the organisation’s turnover band together with the court’s assessment of culpability and harm. Turnover bands run from micro (£2 million or less) through small (£2 million to £10 million) and medium (£10 million to £50 million) to large (£50 million and over). For a large organisation, a high culpability, category 1 harm offence has a starting point of £2.4 million within a range of £1.5 million to £6 million.
Across 2024/25 the HSE brought 246 prosecutions with a 96% conviction rate and total fines exceeding £33 million.
Then there is the operational cost that rarely gets counted: a prohibition notice stopping the machine, an investigation occupying senior management, a civil claim, insurance loading, and the effect on an experienced operator’s confidence and on everyone who witnessed it.
Assessing your guarding properly
A defensible PUWER assessment programme covers the following for each item of work equipment:
Every task, not just production. Setting, tool changing, blockage clearing, cleaning, planned maintenance, fault diagnosis, and end-of-line adjustments.
Verification, not observation. Measure guard openings against reach-through distances. Time the run-down of dangerous parts and compare it against interlock release. Test the stopping performance of trip devices. Function-test emergency stops.
Isolation and lock-off. Confirm that every machine can be isolated from all energy sources, including stored energy such as pneumatic pressure, hydraulic accumulators, springs and gravity, and that a documented lock-off procedure exists and is used.
The people doing the work. Speak to operators and maintenance staff, out of earshot of supervision if you can. They will tell you which guard is a nuisance and which task everybody does the quick way. That conversation is worth more than the inspection itself.
Records that mean something. Date, assessor, equipment identification, tasks assessed, findings, actions with owners and dates, and evidence of close-out. An assessment with open actions from two years ago is evidence against you, not for you.
A trigger-based review cycle. Annually as a baseline, and immediately on any modification, relocation, change of use, near miss, or change of operator group.
Soteria (UK) Ltd carries out PUWER and machinery guarding assessments for manufacturers across the UK and Ireland. Our consultants are Chartered Health and Safety Practitioners registered on the OSHCR, with practical experience of production environments — so the recommendations you get are workable on your shop floor, not just correct on paper.
Call 01925 626283 or email info@soteriauk.co.uk.
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