Health & Safety regulations for small to medium businesses can be very time consuming and expensive. Unfortunately the same regulations apply if you employ five staff or one hundred and five staff. We at Solutions have the answer, we will not only make sure you are up to date and compliant with all the current regulations we will also provide on-going help and advice You will have a wealth of information to call on, an advice line and your own compliance page on our website with all documents and relevant dates easily accessible and managed for you.

We will create everything required including:

• Health & Safety Policy
• Risk assessment covering all current regulations
• Legal posters
• Legal Signage
• Reporting books
• Library of relevant information
• Regular policy updates

As well as an on-going competent person service required by law.

How and Why Health and Safety Laws Apply to You

The Health and Safety Commission (HSC) conducted a review of health and safety regulation in 1994. It found that people were confused about the differences between:

• Guidance
• Approved Codes of Practice (ACOPs)
• Regulations

and how they relate to each other.

Health and Safety is not as complicated as people have been lead to believe, yes it’s true that there are hundreds of documents to understand and read to put a policy in place for your business but if you have read them all like us then making your business compliant can be done with ease.

The basis of British health and safety law is the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.

The Health and Safety at Work Act sets out the obligations which employers have towards employees and members of the public, and employees have to themselves and to each other. These obligations are set out in sub regulations the most common of these regulations apply to all businesses:

Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005

The Health and Safety (First-Aid) Regulations 1981

Manual Handling Regulations 1992 (as amended)

The Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992

Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) Regulations 2002

Reassuringly what the law requires here is what good management and common sense would lead employers to do anyway: in other words, look at what the risks are and take common sense measures to tackle them.

The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 (the Management Regulations) generally make more explicit what employers are required to do to manage health and safety under the Health and Safety at Work Act. Like the Act, they apply to every work activity.

The regulations require that every business with five or more employees by law must have:

A Health and Safety Policy “Statement of intent”

A Risk Assessment taking in all current regulations

Access to “On-going help from a competent person to meet the requirements of HandS law”

The main requirement on employers is to carry out a risk assessment. Employers with five or more employees by law need to record the findings of the risk assessment. Employers with five or less employees are only recommended to carry out a risk assessment but however many employees you have the regulations are clear that ignorance of the regulations are no defence.