Health and safety at work

Follow the links below if you wish to read a certain section of this page.

Responsibilities
Registering A Business
Ten Key Elements Of Health & Safety

Responsibilities

All businesses, no matter how small, have a legal responsibility for the health and safety of all its employees. These include full time, part time, temporary and permanent, students on work experience, mobile and home workers and any others who are affected by the business or its activities, including any suppliers, sub contractors or customers.

The legislation is in place to ensure that by taking the correct precautions and providing a satisfactory work environment, people are prevented form suffering harm at work (whether it be through illness or physical harm)

By implementing good health and safety policies the business can ensure that it is complying with the law and provides an acceptable working environment.

Registering a business

Businesses that have employees or allow others access to the premises as part of the business may have to register with the HSE or their local authority.

Business that must register with the HSE (Form F9) include manufacturers, engineering workshops,and car repair businesses.

Those businesses that must register with their local authority’s environmental health department ( Form OSR1 )(include amongst others, shops and offices that have employees, hotels and bed and breakfast establishments, wholesale warehouses and launderettes.)

On the HSE website there is a flowchart that will help to decide if a business needs to register and with whom.

Ten key areas which should be undertaken by businesses

Decide what can cause harm to individuals and what precautions can be put into place to prevent such occurances i.e. carrying out a risk assessment. Risk assessments do not have to be onerous and in many firms particularly in the commercial and light industrial sectors the hazards are few but assessing them is a necessity.

All small businesses have a duty to carry out a risk assessment. If a business has five or more employees it is required by law to:

• Record any significant findings of the assessment and
• Identify any groups who are identified by the assessment as being at risk

• Make the decision on how the business will manage Health and Safety. If the business has 5 or more employees this has to be a written document.
• If the business has any employees it needs to take out employers liability insurance. (A recent exception is if there is only one employee and he is the director/owner of the company)
• Free health and safety training should be provided to all employees so that they are aware of all the risks in the workplace and how to deal with them.
• Appoint one or more competent persons to help meet the businesses duties under health and safety legislation. In practice this can be the business owner (if they have sufficient knowledge and time to devote to the role), one or more employees (providing that they are given sufficient time and resources to carry out their responsibilities properly) or an external resource (if there is insufficient time/ competence within the business)
• The business must provide toilets, washing facilities and drinking water for all employees (and should make suitable facilities available for disabled). See health safety and welfare
• Employees should be consulted on all health and safety issues.
• If the business has employees it must display the health and safety law poster or display a leaflet containing the same information.
• An employer, self employed or someone in charge of a workplace must report certain work related accidents, diseases and dangerous occurrences namely deaths, major injuries, incidents which result in an employee or self employed person having an accident and the person is away from work or unable to work normally for more than 3 days, injuries to the public where they are required to be taken to hospital, work related diseases, and occurances which did not result in an injury but could have done.

Any new business should register with the relevant authority (see above)

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