What Should You Include in a Health and Safety Policy?
It is a legal requirement for any company employing five people or more to have a written health and safety policy in place to protect their employees in the workplace. This document will lay out your approach to health and safety issues within your organisation and how you manage them.
Putting together a robust and clear health and safety policy ensures your compliance with the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA), the key legislation concerning employee safety in the workplace. But what does such a policy actually entail?
In this article, we’re going to discuss the three main provisions of any health and safety policy and how they can improve things for your business.
Health and Safety Provisions
Under the Health and Safety at Work Act, your policy should be made up of three separate components: a Statement of Intent, an organisation plan, and the actual health and safety arrangements. They can be summarised as follows:
Statement of Intent: this confirms your commitment to health and safety in the workplace, laying out your aims and objectives for complying with all existing and future legislation.
Organisation: this clarifies who in your company is responsible for health and safety and their particular remits.
Arrangements: this determines how Health and Safety risks in the workplace are managed.
Statement of Intent
Your Statement of Intent (sometimes referred to as a Health and Safety Policy Statement) sets out how your organisation intends to comply with legislation and regulations and how you plan to manage health and safety issues in the workplace. This document should include non-measurable aims as well as measurable objectives.
A Statement of Intent should be written using clear and concise language that is simple to understand with a minimum of jargon. This is a high-level document, so it does not require a huge level of detail (this comes later, in the Arrangements section). That said, your aims and objectives should be clear and deliverable, since they will act as the foundation for the rest of the policy.
If your organisation operates across multiple sites, you may need to produce a general Statement of Intent covering the whole of the company, with individual policies written to reflect the unique circumstances at each local site.
Organisation
This part of your policy document includes the names, positions, and duties of the individuals responsible for health and safety matters within your organisation. It’s typically composed as an organisational chart, showing the hierarchy of your company and the roles of the individuals concerned. This will show how health and safety concerns can be escalated up the chain of command to management, where required. Each named individual should be clear about where their responsibilities begin and end and at which point health and safety issues should be passed onto a colleague.
Arrangements
This makes up the bulk of the health and safety policy and will detail the specific systems and procedures you have in place to achieve the aims and objectives laid out in your Statement of Intent. This will typically include things like evacuation procedures, fire and emergency drills, first aid protocols, equipment and machinery safety, staff training, fire wardens, the use of PPE, the control of exposure to specific hazards, manual handling, risk assessments, food hygiene, any drug or alcohol policies you have in place, mental well-being programmes, and so much more. Anything, in fact, that has a direct or indirect effect on the health and safety of your staff and visitors should be included here.
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Get in touch
If you need help putting together a suitable Health and Safety policy for your company, give Dromore Safety Services Ltd a call today to see how we can help you. You can contact us on 07717 210 323 to arrange a free consultation with one of our experts.
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