Personal health and safety consultant

Don’t feel silly for asking this, it catches a lot of people out. Health and safety is the process an organisation goes through, required under law, to keep everyone safe from harm and this includes members of the public. Health and safety generally starts with a health and safety policy, which describes your commitments to keeping people safe.

The law states that you should have a written policy if you employ 5 or more persons.

The law states it doesn’t have to be written; it doesn’t say you shouldn’t have it. You can still be prosecuted under health and safety laws  if you have less than 5 employees and have no or or inadequate controls over risk

Of course everyone is responsible for their own health and safety, but as a business owner, the buck will generally stop with you!

A hazard is defined as anything that has the potential to cause harm. There are literally hundreds of hazards on a standard building site, some obvious, some not so obvious. You have a duty under law to identify significant hazards and deal with appropriately.

A risk assessment is a process of identifying hazards, identifying who they affect and the likelihood of it happening and how these risks are controlled.

They can be unlimited fines and/or imprisonment depending on the severity.

Competence is measured as a person’s (or company’s) skills, knowledge, attitude and aptitude, technical knowledge and experience. They are essential for a job to be done properly and generally safely. For smaller one man bands this could be as simple as checking they have a competency card such as CSCS/CPCS or a GasSafe (formerly Corgi card). Nearly every trade (including labouring) has an affiliation to a competency card scheme that includes some form of health and safety training associated. Larger companies might ask you to complete a PQQ (pre-qualifying questionnaire) which will drill into your own health and safety compliance to check things like your accident record and that your own staff are suitably competent.

Yes, we sure can. We can also act as your ‘competent person’ as usually required.

You sure can. It’s better to have something to work to rather than nothing. Just be aware that all sites may be different and therefore you may not have captured all the risks on a new site, these are called generic risk assessments. Having not controlled a specific risk on site might lead to an accident, which could lead to you having to answer some pretty awkward questions and could leave you being hit in the pocket. A risk assessment isn’t just about having a piece of paper to cover you, it is genuinely there to protect your workers, sub-contractors and members of the public from your work activities. A risk assessment might even change during a job say if there’s an accident or new members of staff, especially young persons. We can help you with all that. Specific risk assessments are documents that highlight all the significant risks on each individual site.

Although arguably the most significant part of health and safety, Controlling hazards and risk is just the first part. To understand the risks fully, a series of assessments will need to take place. These assessments are used to construct the Risk assessment. These need to be monitored and reviewed periodically.

Over the last few years environmental aspects have been ‘bolted’ on to H&S advisor’s role. It’s considered now that harming the environment is as bad as harming in employee. Many builds have planning conditions, some of which relate to environmental aspects and the potential to cause environmental harm. Just as the health and safety executive can drop into your site and bring enforcement action, so can the environmental agency. The environmental agency may be concerned with how the build deals with emissions to air or emissions to ground water. They might want to see an environmental action plan should you have a fuel spill etc etc. We can help you deal with all that as well.

Yes we can but generally only if you’ve taken a package which include this service.

We’ll give you a hour of our time absolutely free to run a basic assessment. Should you require a more in-depth assessment we can give you an idea of how long it will take and how much it might cost. Every organisation is different and each may have a different level of system in place. Because of this, it’s impossible to give a ‘fixed’ cost on our website.

The health and safety ‘process’ relies on a system of constant monitoring and improvement. Monitoring could be a visit to site to check the workers are doing everything they should be and making sure they’re not doing anything they shouldn’t. Don’t worry, we don’t shout and holler at anyone, but will help with guidance and and provide you a report to help you focus on ways of improving. All of this adds to your professionalism and how your customers see you as well as showing everyone just how much you care.