​When working with a Health and Safety Services company, you can expect expert guidance to help you maintain a safe and compliant work environment. Whether you’re in construction, manufacturing, or any other industry, these professionals provide tailored solutions to ensure the health and safety of your workforce and compliance with regulations. Here’s what you can typically expect from partnering with a Health and Safety Services provider.
Comprehensive Risk Assessments
A reputable Health and Safety Services company will begin by conducting thorough risk assessments of your workplace. This involves identifying potential hazards, assessing who might be at risk, and recommending control measures to reduce or eliminate those risks. These assessments are crucial for ensuring that your business operates in a safe and legally compliant manner.
Development of Policies and Procedures
Another key service is the creation and implementation of health and safety policies and procedures tailored to your business. This includes everything from emergency protocols to day-to-day operational guidelines. A Health and Safety Services provider will help you develop these policies to ensure they meet regulatory requirements and reflect industry best practices.
Ongoing Support and Training
Ongoing support is another essential component of what a Health and Safety Services company offers. This often includes providing regular safety training for your staff, ensuring they understand and adhere to the latest safety protocols. The company may also conduct periodic audits and inspections to keep safety standards up to date.
Tailored Solutions for Your Industry
Every industry has unique challenges, and Health and Safety Services are designed to meet those specific needs. Whether you work in construction, manufacturing, or another sector, expect customized safety solutions that address your specific risks.
By partnering with a Health and Safety Services company, you can expect expert support that keeps your workplace safe, compliant, and efficient.

How do you complete construction risk assessments?

Completing construction risk assessments is a crucial process for ensuring safety on any construction site. The goal is to identify hazards, evaluate who may be at risk, and implement control measures to reduce the chance of accidents. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to complete construction risk assessments effectively.

Step 1: Identify hazards
The first step in conducting construction risk assessments is to thoroughly inspect the site for potential hazards. These could include working at heights, handling hazardous materials, or the operation of heavy machinery. It’s important to consider every aspect of the project, from equipment used to worker activities.
Step 2: Identify who is at risk and how they could be harmed
Next, you need to determine who might be at risk and how they could be harmed by the identified hazards. This includes employees, contractors, visitors, and even the public in some cases. Consider the nature of the work and how individuals could be exposed to danger, whether through direct involvement or accidental proximity to hazardous tasks.
Step 3: Assess the risks and identify suitable control measures
After identifying who is at risk, the next step in construction risk assessments is to assess the likelihood and severity of each risk. Then, identify suitable control measures to eliminate or reduce those risks. Control measures may include safety barriers, personal protective equipment (PPE), or modified work practices.
Step 4: Record the assessment
Recording your construction risk assessments is critical for documentation and legal compliance. It provides a written record of identified hazards, who is at risk, and the control measures in place to manage those risks.
Step 5: Review the assessment
Finally, regular reviews are essential to ensure the effectiveness of your construction risk assessments. Reassess the site when changes occur or at routine intervals to keep safety measures up-to-date.
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By following these steps, you can ensure your construction risk assessments are comprehensive and effective in maintaining site safety.

​Work at Height is a common hazard in many workplaces, including construction sites, warehouses, factories, and maintenance operations.

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To protect workers from falls, employers have a legal duty to ensure that work from height is properly planned, supervised, and carried out safely. The Work at Height Regulations 2005 provide guidance on how to manage the risks of working from height and ensure the safety of workers.

Here are some key points to consider when working from height:
Planning and risk assessment: Before starting work from height, it is important to assess the risks and plan the work accordingly. This involves identifying the hazards, determining the equipment and methods required, and ensuring that workers are trained and competent.

Equipment selection: The right equipment should be selected for the job. This includes ladders, scaffolds, access towers, and other types of work platforms. The equipment should be appropriate for the task, in good condition, and regularly inspected.

Training and supervision: Workers who work from height should receive appropriate training and supervision. This includes training on how to use the equipment safely, how to work at height without putting themselves or others at risk, and how to respond in an emergency.

Fall prevention: The best way to protect workers from falls is to prevent them from happening in the first place. This can be achieved through the use of guardrails, barriers, and other edge protection systems.
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Fall arrest systems: In some cases, it may be necessary to use fall arrest systems to protect workers from falls. These systems include harnesses, lanyards, and anchor points. It is important to ensure that these systems are correctly installed and used.


Rescue planning: In the event of a fall, it is important to have a rescue plan in place. This involves identifying the procedures for rescuing a worker who has fallen, including how to raise the alarm, how to access the worker, and how to administer first aid.

Working from height can be a dangerous activity, but with the right planning, equipment, and training, it is possible to manage the risks and ensure the safety of workers. Employers have a legal duty to protect their workers from falls, and failure to do so can result in serious injuries or even fatalities.

How is Health and Safety performance monitored and measured?
 
Health and Safety management systems normally work on a PDCA system (Plan, Do, Check, Act). Monitoring and review form part of the CHECK and ACT sections of most safety management systems, including the requirements within ISO 45001 (2018) and recommendations made within HS(G).
Active methods monitor the design, development, installation and operation of management arrangements. These tend to be preventive in nature, for example: routine inspections of premises, plant and equipment by staff. health surveillance to prevent harm to health.
Checking that you are managing risks in your organisation is a vital, sometimes overlooked step. It will give you the confidence that you are doing enough to keep on top of health and safety and maybe show you how you could do things better in the future.
Checking involves setting up an effective monitoring system, backed up with sensible performance measures.
Investigating and analysing incidents will also make a big contribution to understanding health and safety in your business. 
Monitoring
You need to be sure that your monitoring adds value and isn't just a tick-box exercise.
Good-quality monitoring will not just identify problems but will help you understand what caused them and what sort of changes are needed to address them. Poor monitoring might tell you that something is wrong but may not help you understand why, or what to do about it.
How to monitor
Use the same approach to monitor your health and safety performance as you would when you monitor other aspects of your business.
Monitoring requires time and effort. So you need to allocate appropriate resources and possibly train staff involved in it ahead of time. Businesses may monitor health and safety in different ways, depending on size and sector, but there are some basic principles that apply across the board.
Monitoring needs to be timely. As with all other business systems, you want to know what is happening in your organisation at the moment rather than at some point in the past.
The outcome of your monitoring will have most impact if it is reported back to key decision makers in your organisation. Unless there's a board-level commitment in advance, so you can act on what your monitoring tells you, then all your efforts to collect information could be wasted. 
Types of monitoring
There are many different types of monitoring but they can generally be categorised as either 'active' or 'reactive':

• Active methods monitor the design, development, installation and operation of management arrangements. These tend to be preventive in nature, for example:
  • routine inspections of premises, plant and equipment by staff
  • health surveillance to prevent harm to health
  • planned function check regimes for key pieces of plant
    
    
• Reactive methods monitor evidence of poor health and safety practice but can also identify better practices that may be transferred to other parts of a business, for example:
  • investigating accidents and incidents
  • monitoring cases of ill health and sickness absence records
    
    

Selecting the right measures
Most organisations use performance measures as part of their monitoring. Checking performance against a range of pre-determined measures is one of the most frequently used techniques of monitoring.
Selecting the right measures to use is the critical step. Using the wrong measures will cause a lot of unnecessary and unproductive effort, with little benefit to your organisation.

What are Health and Safety Procedures?
Health and safety procedures consist of implementing a safe system of work, work instructions, permits, etc. These factors all ensure a safe working environment. Therefore, they usually consist of step-by-step instructions and related information needed to help carry out tasks safely.

Do we need a health & safety advisor?
​If your business or organisation doesn't have the competence to manage health and safety in-house, for example, if it's large, complex or high risk, you can get help from a consultant or adviser. But remember, as the employer, managing health and safety will still be your legal duty.
There a number of strong benefits that comes with hiring a health and safety consultant.
Not all organisations have access to competent health and safety support in house. Even if you do, you may need extra help.  A Health & Safety advisor can give you access to the expertise and tailored support you need. As consultants typically work for a variety of different businesses from a range of different industries, they usually have a vast amount of skills, experience and knowledge that they can bring to your business. Their experience will enable them to better your business’ health and safety, in a way that’s specific to your business needs and to the industry your business sits in.
They should have the skills, knowledge and experience to be able to recognise hazards in your business and help you put sensible controls in place to protect workers and others from harm.
It's not usually essential for them to have formal qualifications and they're not required by law to have formal training, although it can help.

How is health and safety law enforced?
 
Health and safety laws applying to your business are enforced by HSE inspectors or by officers from your local authority. An inspector's role is to: investigate (when accidents have happened or a complaint is made) whether people are at risk, to find out if something has gone wrong.
An inspector's role is to:

• investigate (when accidents have happened or a complaint is made) whether people are at risk, to find out if something has gone wrong
• require you to take action to control risks properly if you are not already complying with the law
• take appropriate enforcement action in relation to any non-compliance, ranging from advice on stopping dangerous work activities to potentially taking prosecutions where people are put at serious risk
• provide advice and guidance to help you comply with the law and avoid injuries and ill health at work

 
Inspectors have the right of entry to your premises as well as the right to talk to employees and safety representatives, and exercise powers to help them fulfil their role.
HSE operates a Fee for Intervention (FFI) cost recovery scheme. If you are breaking health and safety laws, HSE may recover its costs from you by charging a fee for the time and effort it spends on helping you to put the matter right, such as investigating and taking enforcement action.
If an HSE inspector visits your premises and you want to confirm their identity, they all carry identification and you can ask to see this.
Inspectors and local authority officers prioritise the highest risks and those businesses which fail to manage health and safety properly.

Do I need safety accreditations such as CHAS, Safecontractor and Constructionline?
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Gaining an official health and safety accreditation has several benefits: larger clients are more likely to require official H&S. Gaining accreditation can thus give you access to more lucrative contracts and greater business opportunities. Accreditation shows that you take health and safety seriously.
Although contractor accreditation isn’t compulsory it does hold significant benefits for your construction business, not least in boosting your credibility and raising your profile in the industry.  
It can help you secure more contracts and provides clear proof during the pre-qualification stage that you take health and safety seriously.

When you gain accreditation the scheme provider’s logo can be used to good effect to market your business.

No matter if you're running a new business or an old one, it can be hard to keep up with the constantly changing health and safety laws and requirements. Still, every business needs to make sure it's following the Regulations that apply to it.

Here are the top reasons why your business should work with an health and safety advisor:

Business owners can sometimes be too close to their businesses to see where policies, procedures, and provisions for health and safety are lacking. Plus, it's likely that they don't know much about health and safety. Few companies were built on the knowledge and skills of a single person. An independent, expert health and safety consultant can do a full audit of your current workplace practices and quickly make a list of areas that need to be improved according to the current laws that apply to your business. Half the battle is won if you can figure out where you might not be complying the Regulations. Once you have this important information, you can make plans to deal with and resolve the problems.

Managing your Health and Safety risks would also have an affect on your overall Business risk and that is why it is important that you have suitable Business insurance cover.

One of the biggest problems is knowing what insurance you need to protect your business. Four of the most common include:

Employers' Liability Insurance: Employers' liability insurance pays for workers' medical bills and lost wages if they get hurt or sick at work.

Public Liability Insurance: Liability insurance is a part of the general insurance system for financing risks. It protects both the buyer and the insured if the buyer is sued for something that is covered by the insurance policy.

Product liability insurance covers the cost of compensating anyone hurt by a faulty product that your business designs, makes, or sells.

Professional Indemnity Insurance: Professional indemnity insurance protects you from claims made by clients or third parties for loss or damage caused by your services or advice that were not up to par. Even if you give a service or advice for free, someone can still sue you for compensation.

An insurance broker can assist you in advising what you specifically require for business insurance.

Provide Your Staff With The Best
Companies that show their employees that they care about them will gain more credibility, not only with their own teams but also with potential partners, clients, customers, and new leads. Make your employees feel like you care about their well-being at work, and you will save the business a lot of money on hiring and keeping good employees. A health and safety consultancy can give you the advice you need to make sure your employees feel safe, appreciated, and motivated.

Build A Good Work Environment
By using the skills and knowledge of health and safety experts, a business can create a health and safety culture that is good for both the business and its employees. A health and safety consultant can help business owners decide what the best policies are for the workplace and how to get employees to follow them. The activities that are suggested will depend on the workplace, but they could include risk assessments of the workplace or help with writing health and safety documents.
 
At Ashdown Safety, we recommend that you talk to an insurance broker about the types of insurance your business needs. It is advised that you tell your insurance broker if you have hired a qualified health and safety advisor, as this may get you a reduction in your insurance premiums or may mean that you have access to a wider market of Insurance companies to quote you from.

Please feel free to get in touch with us if you require any Health and Safety advice or we can give you the details of a Qualified Insurance Broker, David Pringle at Pringle Insurance Brokers, [email protected] , 01892 800925.

What is an Health and Safety Policy?
A written Health and Safety Policy a useful document for all organisations and employers. A Health and Safety policy sets out your general approach to health and safety. It explains how you, as an employer, will manage health and safety in your business.
You should ensure that your employees have access to the Health and Safety policy, and any amendments to it.

Do we need a Health and Safety Policy?

It is a legal requirement for any Employer that has 5 or more employees to have a written Health and Safety Policy.

Your policy should cover three areas.
Statement of intent
This is a statement of your commitment to managing health and safety and your safety goals and targets as an employer. This should be signed by the Director responsible for Health and Safety, and reviewed regularly.
Organisation
This section details who in what job role has a specific responsibility for health and safety.
Arrangements for health and safety
The arrangements section should give details of the practical safety arrangements you have in place for each of the main health and safety issues, tasks and hazards that your employees are exposed to and how they will be kept safe.