A floor’s grip should be a number, not a guess

Walk across a tiled foyer in St Ives on a wet morning, or a polished corridor in a Huntingdon care home, and you are trusting something you cannot see: the grip between your shoe and the floor. Most of the time that trust is repaid. Sometimes it isn’t — and when a floor lets someone down, the consequences are rarely small.

The Health and Safety Executive is blunt about the scale of it. Slips and trips are the single most common cause of major injury in UK workplaces, and account for over a quarter of all non-fatal workplace accidents. They are also, mostly, preventable — but only if you know where your floors actually stand, rather than assuming.

If it hasn’t been measured, it hasn’t been assessed. It has only been assumed.

The number, and how it’s read

The instrument that settles the question is the pendulum. A weighted arm swings a calibrated rubber slider across the floor, reproducing the action of a slipping heel, and records the result as a Pendulum Test Value — the PTV. It is the method the HSE prefers, and crucially it works in the wet, which is where most slips actually happen. We test wet and dry, in three directions.

Where floors get contaminated — a kitchen, a food-processing line, a wash-down area — a second measure matters: surface roughness, or Rz, taken in microns. A floor needs enough microscopic texture to break through grease and water and still grip a shoe. Below 10 is high risk, 10 to 20 moderate, above 20 low. Used alongside the pendulum, it shows how a floor is changing over time. We are accredited for both.

Whose problem it is

Under the Health and Safety at Work Act and the Workplace Regulations, every employer and occupier has a duty to keep floors safe so far as is reasonably practicable, and to assess the risk. In care settings, the Care Quality Commission expects slip risk to be actively managed as part of safe care. A measured PTV is what turns ‘we clean regularly’ into evidence an insurer, the HSE or the CQC will accept.

Why independence is the point

A test is only worth as much as the people behind it. This service is delivered by Surface Performance, an entirely independent laboratory with no connection to any flooring manufacturer, treatment company or equipment maker, and no commission from anyone. We test floors; we do not sell them — so nothing nudges the number. It is the same accredited work trusted on sites from Amazon and Gatwick to British Airways and the cruise line TUI.

None of this needs to be complicated for you. Tell us which floors matter and where you are in Huntingdonshire, and we turn an invisible risk into a clear, documented number — and tell you, independently, what to do about it.