With Occupational Health and Safety regulations continually applying more responsibility upon business owners and management to carry out self-assessment of the safety risks in their business, one common area of neglect is inspection of pallet racking.

Steel storage is a valuable asset in regard to its ability to successfully store even more valuable assets; its failure can have severe financial implications not only for damage to stored product, but also in the event of personal injury resulting from its failure, possibly leading to an action against the company by the injured party and/or OH&S.

An extract from Australian Standard (AS4084 – 1993 Australian Standard – Steel Storage Racking is as follows:

“9.2 Inspections Inspections shall be carried out on a regular basis and at least every twelve months.”

As they say, prevention is always better than the cure, so we recommend rack safety audits should be a critical component of your risk management procedures, and if such inspections are not currently in place, contact should be made with the suppliers / distributors of your systems to implement at least an annual audit.

Cost For Home Insurance Up By 30% - NIBA Survey Says

Hail storms, wild weather, natural disasters and bush fires, the past year has seen premiums for car and home insurance rise by up to 30 per cent, says NIBA (National Insurance Brokers Association) in their latest July 2010 survey.

Soft Cost Increases for Business

While car and home owners are forced to dig deeper into their pockets to pay for the extra premium increases, businesses on the other hand were found to experience a lesser impact on theirs with cost increases of below 10 per cent.

Why the Massive Hikes?

Many insurance policy holders wonder why these hikes have been put onto their shoulders; if you look at it, 30% increase in cost is big enough to be noticed by even the worst budget-conscious policy holder. Naturally, many question the need for these rate increases.

Fact is that according to the NIBA survey many insurers have been hit financially with premium payouts for the natural disasters we’ve had to deal with over the past year; the Victorian bush fires, massive storms in Perth and Melbourne earlier in 2010, floods in Northern NSW, and more. All of the above has seen a huge increase in insurance policy payouts, resulting in a loss of profit for the insurance companies themselves.

Back in May this year, the Courier-Mail reported that Suncorp had seen an increase of up to 10 per cent for the cost of their home insurance policies. The report also stated that Suncorp was actively using new systems that allowed them to reprice their policies within a couple of days of a natural disaster.

Business Insurance - NIBA Not Affected by Online Brokers

Noel Pettersen, NIBA’s Chief Executive told The Courier-Mail that “strong competition amongst underwriters” were driving prices of business insurance.

According to Pettersen, “we’re fairly cheap compared to other parts in the world.” Business premiums had risen 1-9 per cent, mainly for commercial property, public liability and business interruption. Professional indemnity rates on the other hand were “flat after significant increases during he height of the global financial crisis," Mr Pettersen stated.

He realises that there is an increased competition from online brokers as they try to dominate the Internet. However, Mr Pettersen doesn’t feel that NIBA has seen an impact from its online competition so far.

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