Advice on writing a health and safety policy for my employees
Sep 23 2006
Writing a health and safety policy is an important step for all businesses – as well as a legal requirement for those with five or more employees. The Heath and Safety Executive (HSE) defines a health and safety policy as a statement about how you will manage health and safety issues within your workplace. It should set out the arrangements that you have put in place to address health and safety issues and it should say who does what and when and how they do it.
While there are generic guidelines to follow, the health and safety issues that your business faces – and, hence, the resulting policy – will be unique to your business. In order to identify the health and safety issues specific to your business, you will need to conduct an initial risk assessment. In many cases this process will be relatively straightforward, however it is important to remember that risk areas are not just limited to those associated with industrial activities such as machinery and hazardous substances but can also include a wide range of other potential risk areas such as VDU equipment, transport and stress. You also need to consider any risks to visitors to your premises.
Your policy should identify who will carry out these assessments on an ongoing basis, how the findings will be reported and who will approve action required to remove or control risks. Your policy should also cover health and safety training for staff, consultants and regular visitors to your premises and ongoing consultation with staff.
The HSE says that a health and safety policy should be reviewed regularly, ideally at least every year, as well as whenever there are organisational or operational changes within the workplace.
For guidelines on writing a health and safety policy visit businesslink4london.com.
The HSE also produces a publication called ‘Stating Your Business’, which is a particularly useful starting point as it contains a template that you can use and is aimed at small firms in particular. Click here to download it.