If you are an employee who works from home and gets injured whilst working at home, you may theoretically be able to bring an accident at work claim against your employer. The business you work for has a common law duty to do all they reasonably can to keep you safe whilst you are at work. If you work from home, that duty includes keeping you safe whilst you do so.
By law, employers are required to carry out a suitable risk assessment of the risk to which their employees may be exposed whilst at work. This requirement still applies to employees working from home. Let’s suppose the employer fails to carry out a risk assessment of a client’s home working conditions adequately or at all, and an accident occurs which causes injury to the employee. In that case, the employer could be liable to pay compensation in the injured worker brings an accident at work claim against him.
In reality, the court would accept that the employer has much less control over the safety of an employee working from home than they do at their place of business. It would be challenging to bring a successful accident at work claim for something that happened whilst you were working from home. Working at home is still relatively new to many people, and a successful claim against an employer will eventually be made by someone suffering an injury in an accident whilst working at home
If you are injured in an accident at home that is non work related, you would not be eligible for compensation from your employer. Depending on your employment’s contractual terms, you may continue receiving full pay whilst absent from work. Alternatively, it’s more likely you will only be able to claim SSP of £99.35 per week for a maximum of 28 weeks if you are employed but cannot work. To qualify for SSP, your average earnings for the two months before the accident must have been at least £123 a week.