Health and Safety Policies
Health and Safety Policies and Procedures
As the owner of a business, you have a legal requirement to have a policy for managing health and safety at your workplace. This policy should set out how you, the employer will manage the health and safety of your employees and others that come into contact with your organisation. It will state who does what, when and how.
If your business has more than 5 employees it is a requirement that the policy is written down and that any changes are communicated to your staff. However, whatever the size of your business, we recommend it’s best practice to create a written document. This way, it is available to refer to, is easy to disseminate to employees and leaves no room for confusion or mistake.
Three Key Areas to a Health and Safety Policy
Statement of Intent
Roles and Responsibilities
Arrangements
Statement of Intent – This states your general policy on health and safety within your workplace as well as your aims and commitment to managing health and safety. The policy is signed off by you the employer, or the most senior person in the company.
Roles and Responsibilities – Here you list who has responsibility for managing health and safety in your business, including names, positions and roles.
Arrangements – This section is the largest part of your health and safety policy. It states how things are done and how you will achieve your health and safety aims. For example, it would include details of risk assessments, training for your team, safety equipment and signage, first aid or emergency procedures.
How Sureteam can Support You to Create Your Policy
A health and safety policy should be written by a competent person. This is usually the person responsible for the business’s health and safety. If however, you don’t have a dedicated Health and Safety Officer and the responsibility falls to you as the business owner this can be a daunting task.
Sureteam, as an outsourced health and safety consultancy, is here to support organisations of all sizes, working with you to fully understand the business’s risks and hazards and produce a tailored health and safety policy specific to your workplace. It is straight-forward 3 step process and our team of highly qualified consultants can do much of the work for you:
Detailed Understanding of Your Business
Relevant Risks and Procedures Noted
Tailored H&S Policy Created
Contact Us for More Information
At Sureteam we’ve been advising and helping organisations with health and safety for the past 25 years. Call us on 01666 503686 for a free initial consultation and to understand how we can help you.
The Benefits of Partnering with Sureteam
Working with Sureteam gives you pace of mind and confidence that your health and safety policy is comprehensive, covering all aspects of your business and ensuring you are legally complaint. Working with our highly experienced and competent consultants reduces the pressure on you and gives you back the time to do what you are good at and run your business.
Saves You Time & Reduces Pressure
Full Confidence in your Policy
Compliancy Achieved
Additional Support Available
If during the process of writing your health and safety policy we discover that you have areas of your health and safety that need improvement, the team at Sureteam are able to continue to support you with other services including Audits and Training to ensure your policies, staff knowledge and procedures are strengthened.
Give us a call
Our team are on hand for any advice or help. Give us a call on 01666 503686 to discuss your health and safety needs. With Sureteam, you have got it covered.
Frequently Asked Questions
The person responsible for the organisation’s health and safety has to sign off and potentially write the policy.
If that falls to you as a business owner and you don’t feel confident and comfortable doing this you have two options.
- You could have some health and safety training helping to fill any knowledge gaps and increase your confidence
- Or you can partner with Sureteam and let our experienced Consultants create the document for you.
Feel free to contact us to discuss the options with our team on 01666 503686
We generally find that many of the free policy templates are either very general or hugely vast documents with many sections that are irrelevant for our clients.
Sureteam always write each policy according to the risks and hazards relevant to your workplace so that the end document is specific to the business.
If you do decide to write your own health and safety policy from a template, we recommend using the HSE template.
If in the process of writing your health and safety policy it is clear that there are gaps in your procedures we may recommend that we undertake a one off Gap Analysis Audit. This will give you a clear overview of your company’s health and safety and how things can be tightened or improved.
Equally if it becomes clear that your team could benefit from more training and a greater knowledge of health and safety issues in their area of work, we have a number of training courses we can offer to bring your team up to date. These include but are not limited to Manual Handling, COSHH, Risk Assessments, Fire Safety, and First Aid.
More Resources
Seeking further advice and support, why not take a look at our Resources section with toolbox talks, HSE publications and useful links or read our latest blog post for advice from our team
