Ask a room full of Bedford business owners whether they’re meeting their health and safety obligations and most will nod along confidently.
Fire risk assessment, done. First aid kit, in the cupboard. But there’s actually one legal duty that catches out a surprising number of small and medium-sized employers, and it’s sitting right in front of their staff eight hours a day: the screen.
Under the Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations, anyone who uses a screen daily for continuous spells of an hour or more counts as a “DSE user”, and their employer owes them more than most realise.
What the law actually requires
The regulations date back to 1992, but they apply just as firmly to a laptop on a kitchen table as they did to a beige monitor in an office.
Home and hybrid workers are covered, which matters in a commuter town like Bedford where a significant slice of the workforce now splits the week between home and an office somewhere along the A421 or down the line at St Pancras.
For every DSE user, an employer must do a workstation assessment, plan the work so there are breaks or changes of activity, and provide an eye test if the employee asks for one, paid for in full by the business.
Not a discretionary perk, not something to be claimed through a benefits scheme if one happens to exist. If a screen user requests an eyesight test, the employer pays.
There’s a second obligation that’s even less well known.
If that test shows the employee needs glasses specifically for screen work, meaning their normal glasses won’t do the job at screen distance, the employer must pay for them too.
The duty only extends to a basic pair, a standard frame with the lenses required for the work, but it exists, and an employee is entitled to rely on it.
Do blue light glasses count?
A question that comes up more and more, and the short answer is no.
The regulations concern corrective prescriptions needed for screen distance, not lens tints or coatings, so no employer is obliged to fund blue light filtering.
If an employee wants the coating, it’s a personal upgrade like any other, typically added for a few pounds at checkout rather than something to build a policy around.
What about contact lens wearers?
Staff who wear contacts sometimes assume the rules don’t apply to them, and employers sometimes quietly hope the same.
Neither is right.
A contact lens wearer who meets the definition of a DSE user has exactly the same right to an employer-funded eye test as anyone else.
If that test shows they need a different correction specifically for screen work, the employer’s duty is usually met by funding a basic pair of glasses for use at the desk rather than a change of lenses, which for most people is the more practical answer anyway: a dedicated pair that lives next to the keyboard.
What compliance actually costs
Here’s the part that should reassure rather than alarm local businesses: meeting this duty is cheap.
A standard eye test costs in the region of £20 to £30, and several of the big optical chains offer corporate eyecare vouchers that fix the price in advance.
The glasses side has changed even more. A basic pair of prescription glasses no longer means a £150 trip to the high street.
Employees or employers can order prescription glasses online from UK retailers such as Glasses2You, where frames come with standard prescription lenses included and cost a fraction of high street prices, with delivery to the door.
For an employer covering a basic pair under the regulations, or an employee upgrading beyond the basic level at their own expense, the numbers involved are far smaller than most people assume.
Set against the cost of not complying, it’s not a difficult sum.
Uncorrected vision problems among screen workers show up as headaches, eye strain, fatigue and mistakes, and a formal complaint to the Health and Safety Executive over a refused eye test is an entirely avoidable way to spend a week.
What Bedford employers should do
The fix is straightforward.
Work out who in the business counts as a DSE user, including anyone working from home. Put a simple written policy in place saying how staff request an eye test and how the business will handle a prescription that’s needed for screen work.
Tell people the policy exists, because a right nobody knows about might as well not exist. Then build it into onboarding so every new starter hears it once.
For employees reading this, the message is simpler still.
If you use a screen for most of your working day and you’ve been putting off an eye test because of the cost, you’re probably entitled to ask your employer to cover it.
Most will say yes the moment they check the rules, because the rules are not ambiguous.
Bedford’s businesses spend a great deal of energy looking after premises, kit and compliance paperwork. The eyes doing the actual work deserve a line on that list too.
“Most of the employees we hear from had no idea their employer was required to fund an eye test until they happened to read about it,” said Russell Andrew, managing director of Glasses2You
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