In reply to JSA:
> (In reply to New POD)
> [...]
>
> I'm a Joiner, does this mean if I hit my thumb with my hammer my employer is liable?
Depends, have they signed you off as trained and competent to use a hammer... If not were you being supervised by a person who is so trained...
In all seriousness, I worked for a window manufacturer doing (amongst other things) bespoke joinery for bay windows & the like and due to staffing issues was temporarily transferred to the dispatch dept which is in a separate building on the same site.
I was cutting some straps to size with my Stanley knife and one of my new colleagues goes "you've gotta have your cut-proof gloves on, it's a disciplinary if you're caught without"... So I go to the supervisor to get a pair issued and I'm refused because "I don't have any record of you being trained to handle sharps"! We then discussed the fact that I'd been using a selection of razor sharp, personally owned tools to make windows, without gloves, in the building across the road for the past year and eventually just walked out laughing, put the knife in my pack-up box, and proceeded to be awfully inefficient, needing a second person to do all my cutting... They sent me back to the production side where the H&S bloke was too busy making sure genuinely dangerous things were kept safe to worry about training people which end of a Stanley knife was sharp; thankfully after only a few days!