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Health & Safety Policies

As part of your Health and Safety contract, you will receive your bespoke health and safety policy which sets out the arrangements you have put in place for managing health and safety in your business.

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Health & Safety Policies

A health and safety policy indicates an organisation's commitment to health and safety and is the first place that employees and others can go to determine the basic health and safety responsibilities and the arrangements to ensure safe systems of work within the organisation and can range from a single simple statement to detailed sets of manuals.

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What is a Health and Safety Policy?

A health and safety policy enables an employer to establish a commitment to health and safety clearly and indicate the means by which this will be achieved. It can take many forms to suit the needs of the organisation that wishes to use it.

At one extreme, it is little more than a broad indication of aims with guidance to where the detail can be found elsewhere. At the other end of the scale, it can be a large formal set of documentation that is completely comprehensive in its coverage of all aspects of health and safety in an organisation. The depth level depends on the size and complexity of the organisation and how the policy will be used.

Do I need a health and safety policy?

A documented health and safety policy is legally required if you employ five or more people. If you employ less than five employees, you do not have to write anything down but it is useful to do so.

What areas should be included in health and safety policy?

Your health and safety policy should have three parts:

Statement of intent
States your general policy on health and safety at work, including your commitment to health and safety and your aims
Responsibilities for health and safety
Lists the names, positions and roles of people in your business who have specific responsibility for health and safety
Arrangements for health and safety
It gives details of the practical arrangements you have in place, showing how you will achieve your health and safety policy aims.

Who should create a health and safety policy?

No one person can be solely responsible for workplace health and safety. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) expects business owners, managers and supervisors, contractors, and staff on all levels within a company to share the responsibility. However, that’s not to say responsibilities are shared equally. Staff in different roles will have different health and safety duties to uphold. Therefore, a health and safety policy may be created by different people within a business.

When should a health and safety policy be reviewed?

A health and safety policy needs to be reviewed regularly to check that it remains relevant. The HSE states that health and safety performance should be reviewed at least once a year.

How is a health and safety policy implemented and changes communicated?

Your health and safety policy should be a practical guide to managing health and safety within your business. A well-drafted policy cannot be effective unless its existence is known and it is readily available to all who are intended to use it. The HSWA, s.2(3) says that it is necessary “to bring the statement and any revision of it to the attention of all [the employer's] employees”.

It is useful to note that the strict interpretation supports a split of the sections of the policy in that it only mandates the distribution of the statement, not of the whole policy. This is reasonable since it allows the employer to inform the employees of the policy's existence, to indicate the aims and objectives and to guide the reader to another document where the detail — the organisation and arrangements sections — can be found.

How can Stallard Kane help?

Not confident that you have everything in place to ensure legal requirements for health and safety are met? We can help ensure you have everything you need, from risk assessments and method statements to drafting Health and Safety policies. We help clients prepare their own risk assessments and any other documentation they require. As part of your Health and Safety contract, you will receive your bespoke health and safety policy which sets out the arrangements you have put in place for managing health and safety in your business.

How to contact

For further assistance for your business, talk to our Health and Safety Team by calling 01427 420 402 or emailing healthandsafety@skaltd.co.uk and #oneoftheteam will be happy to help.

"I would just like to thank you and your team for your support in relation to the HSE visit this morning at The Quays, Concordia Street, Leeds. The input and support have been second to none with the HSE inspector very impressed with all the information supplied. Once again, a big thank you."

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Let's talk about how we can help you, call our specialist UK based support team on:

01427 678 660

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