Practical Health & Safety guidance from the field.

Regulation 7 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires every employer to appoint one or more competent people to help them meet their health and safety duties. There is no exemption for small businesses.

That person can be an employee or an external consultant. For most small and medium businesses it is far cheaper to appoint an external competent person than to employ a Health & Safety manager — and it gives you someone impartial to ring when a client, insurer or inspector starts asking questions.

Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 the responsible person must carry out a fire risk assessment and, where five or more people are employed, record the significant findings.

The common failings are assessments that describe the building but never the work, no consideration of how people with reduced mobility would get out, and action plans with no owner or date. A good assessment ends with a short, ranked list of what to fix and who is doing it.

COSHH covers the health effects of hazardous substances: what breathing it in, swallowing it or getting it on your skin will do to someone over time. DSEAR covers the safety effects of dangerous substances: fire, explosion and energetic reaction.

Plenty of workplaces need both. A powder coating line, a paint store, a joinery shop with fine dust or a site holding bulk fuel will usually need a COSHH assessment for health risk and a DSEAR assessment for explosive atmosphere risk.

Every construction project needs a construction phase plan before work starts — including single-contractor domestic jobs, where the contractor prepares it. It is not limited to notifiable projects.

The plan should be proportionate: the site rules, the significant risks and how they will be controlled, welfare arrangements, and emergency and first aid procedures. A 60-page generic document that nobody on site has read does not satisfy CDM 2015.

Principal contractors and public-sector buyers increasingly ask for more than a Health & Safety policy. An environmental plan shows how waste, spills, dust, noise and water protection will be managed. A quality management system shows how you check that the work has been done properly.

Neither has to mean full ISO certification on day one. A well-written plan and a documented system will usually satisfy the tender, and they give you a sensible foundation if you do decide to certify to ISO 14001 or ISO 9001 later.

Near miss reporting only works when people believe nothing bad happens to them for reporting. If the first response to a report is an investigation into who was at fault, reporting stops within a month.

Keep the form to three fields, feed back visibly on what changed as a result, and let supervisors record reports on behalf of the team. A rising near miss count in the first year is usually a good sign, not a bad one.