204,000 slips a year: your autumn cleaning checklist

Why autumn is genuinely the highest-risk season

Two things stack in autumn that don't apply for the rest of the year: wet floors from rain tracked in at every entrance, and fallen leaves creating slippery, often hidden hazards on paths, car parks and loading areas. A One Call Insurance guide for UK businesses published in August 2026 puts it plainly — slip and trip accidents increase significantly in the workplace during autumn and winter, and the fix is largely preventative: regular sweeping of walkways and entrances, absorbent matting where rain gets tracked in, and better outdoor lighting as daylight hours shrink.

• Entrance matting checked and cleared daily — saturated mats stop absorbing and start contributing to the problem
• Car park and external walkway sweeping increased to daily during leaf-fall, not left to a weekly schedule
• Wet-floor signage stocked and used consistently at every entrance during and after rain, not just when someone remembers
• Loading bay and external staircase surfaces checked specifically — leaves plus rain on painted metal steps is a particularly high-risk combination
• Internal entrance zones (the first few metres inside any door) treated as a distinct high-risk area requiring more frequent attention than the rest of the floor

Housekeeping is the underlying cause, not the weather

It's tempting to treat autumn slips as unavoidable weather-related bad luck. The data doesn't support that: 75% of workplace trips are caused by obstructions on walkways, and poor housekeeping is consistently identified as the most common underlying cause of trip incidents generally. Autumn weather raises the stakes, but the actual risk factor — whether a walkway is clear, dry and well-maintained — is entirely within a premises manager's control, and entirely a function of cleaning frequency and consistency.

What this means for your cleaning contract

If your current cleaning specification was set in spring or summer, it almost certainly doesn't reflect autumn's entrance-matting, external-sweeping and wet-floor-signage needs at the frequency this data suggests. That's a straightforward, low-cost adjustment to an existing contract — not a renegotiation — and one that's easy to justify against the insurance and liability exposure a slip-and-fall claim represents.