Health & Safety and ACC
H&S and ACC, huh how does that work?
It has worked together for some time, 16 years in fact.
Up until the 1st of April 2017, ACC had a workplace safety discount system. Since the introduction of the new HSWA on the 4th of April 2016, they have scrapped it.
What was it?
The WSD scheme was a scheme to encourage businesses to employ better H&S in the workplace and thus reduce their accident exposure and reduce ACC’s accident costs.
It worked on having an H&S system that dovetailed into ACC’s 27 point requirements. Not the easiest thing in the world to do. Moreover, it gave you a 10-20% discount on a rolling 3-year basis.
Frankly, from the feedback we have had, it did not work.
So when the new law came out requiring all businesses to have an H&S plan, ACC quietly withdrew the scheme and turned it off as the three yearly reviews came up.
So what’s replacing it?
Depending on the story you hear, everything to nothing. Officially we are waiting. However, ACC has published a paper on experience rating, and this has quietly been rolled out.
This is likely to be the new approach, without ACC having put that label on it yet.
The basis of experience rating is relative claims experience. They are looking at both your claims experience, as a business, and the claims experience of other businesses in your business classification and compare them.
If you are claiming at a rate higher then your classification average you can expect a penalty, in the form of a % increase in your levy. If you are claiming under the average, then you can expect a discount on your levies similarly.
Now, this is where it gets interesting. ACC have split businesses into two categories, small and large.
Small businesses will experience a +/-10% Levy impact and large businesses from +70% to -50%.
Being that small business are more likely to have large fluctuations with a single claim when compared to other businesses in the same category ACC have limited the change exposure for smaller businesses.
For bigger businesses it is a different story, they have more workers to injure, and a single change can have a significantly higher impact on reducing injury risk. So the penalties and incentives here are larger as a result.
If you are in a manual trade business and fall into the large business category, then a focus on good H&S will pay dividends, in time, with reduced claims experience and lower ACC levies.
So how do you capitalise on all of this?
You give us a call or drop us a message, and we have an initial chat about how we can help.
The difference with us, we do not charge by the hour, most things we do are on either a fixed fee or commission basis, we do not like surprises, nor do we like giving them to our customers.