You have recently joined a family-owned garden centre as its first health and safety coordinator. The centre has been run by the same family for 30 years. It sells plants, compost, garden furniture and tools, and has a café with 80 seats. It employs 45 permanent staff, and about 30 seasonal workers join each spring, most of them students. On a busy weekend in spring, more than 2,000 customers visit, many of them families with young children and older people.

Staff move bags of compost and bark, each weighing 50 litres, from pallets to the car park on flatbed trolleys, and often lift them into customers’ cars. A delivery yard behind the shop is used by lorries and by a fork-lift truck, and customers sometimes walk through it as a short cut to the car park. There is no barrier or sign at the yard entrance, and the fork-lift truck has no reversing alarm.

Seasonal workers start on their first day with a walk round the shop with a supervisor. They are shown the tills, the café and where to take their breaks, but nothing is said about lifting, the fork-lift truck or the delivery yard. The fork-lift truck is driven by two permanent staff, one of whom has a licence from a previous job. The café kitchen has a deep-fat fryer and a hot-water urn, and is staffed at weekends mostly by seasonal workers.

The owners are extending the café to add another 40 seats. They have hired a local builder, who has drawn up the plans and is also doing the work with four workers. The owners told you that “the builder handles all the safety side” and that they have not appointed anyone else. Nobody has asked the builder for a construction phase plan. The work area is beside the café entrance, separated from customers only by plastic tape. Scaffolding has been put up against the café wall, and customers walk underneath it to reach the café. The builder’s workers buy food from the café in their dusty work clothes, and a cement mixer runs beside the outdoor seating.

The general manager, the owners’ son, is proud that “we’ve never had a serious accident in 30 years”. Staff are told that keeping customers happy comes first. Last month, a seasonal worker said they had hurt their back lifting compost into a car and asked for help on busy days. The general manager said that lifting is “part of the job”, and the worker was moved to the tills, where they earn less. Other staff told you they would not raise a concern after seeing what happened. The accident book is kept in a drawer in the general manager’s office, and staff need to ask for it.

There is one trained first aider, the owners’ daughter, who works Monday to Friday. Nobody trained in first aid works at weekends, when the centre is busiest. Last summer, an older customer collapsed in the café on a Saturday. Staff called an ambulance, which took 25 minutes to arrive, and nobody knew whether the centre had a defibrillator. It does not. The first-aid kit in the café was found to be out of date.

The centre has never had a health and safety audit. When you asked how health and safety is reviewed, the general manager said: “we look at things when something happens”. The centre’s insurer has written to say it expects a health and safety audit before it renews the policy next year.

The owners have asked you to speak to them and the general manager next week about health and safety at the centre, and to say what should change before the busy spring season begins.