Health and safety

Every business is responsible for safeguarding the health and safety of anyone affected by its activities, such as employees, customers or visitors to your premises. Of course the risks to health and safety can differ widely between sectors and individual businesses. In many cases, compliance involves little more than a systematic approach to ensuring common sense precautions are taken to prevent accident and injury. However, businesses engaged in high-risk activities will need to focus much more of their attention and resources on health and safety concerns.

Whatever the nature of your business, putting procedures in place to avoid health and safety breaches is essential. In the most serious cases, health and safety failures can lead to serious injury or even death, as well as to potential fines and imprisonment - including liability for corporate manslaughter in some instances.

Overview of your health and safety responsibilities

The cornerstone of your health and safety obligations is the requirement to carry out a health and safety risk assessment, including a fire-risk assessment (contact the fire safety officer to check what is required). This involves identifying potential risks in your business and taking steps to remove or minimise them.

Bear in mind that aspects of your business may present different levels of risk to different individuals. For example, consider whether there are risks that might particularly affect the health and safety of people with disabilties, pregnant women, young people or foreign workers.

You should appoint competent people to be responsible for health and safety and make sure they are trained. Make sure you involve and consult employees in your health and safety activities, and consider including health and safety responsibilities in contracts of employment. You should prepare a written health and safety policy — then monitor and regularly review your policies and procedures to improve them.

Employees should be trained to cope with accidents, and you should provide equipment such as first-aid kits. Maintain an accident book and a reporting system for serious injuries, diseases and incidents. Posters, leaflets and signage can help keep employees informed.

You are required by law to have employers’ liability insurance. You should also check whether you need public liability or any other insurances.

Your business and the environment

Environmental considerations are also a growing concern for many businesses, both in terms of legal requirements and the importance of businesses’ green credentials to growing numbers of customers. Many businesses find that steps taken to respond to these environmental demands have the beneficial side-effect of focusing attention on resource efficiency in the business and thus keeping costs down.