Knowledge Centre
Health and Safety Podcast
21st June 2007 Duration: 6m 03s File size: 5.6MBMORE TH>N BUSINESS's Toby Langford gives an overview of health and safety policies, risk assessments and accident reporting.
The MORE TH>N BUSINESS Podcast with Toby Langford.
Today - You’re very good Health and Safety – Compliance without Tears.
Toby Langford – MORE TH>N BUSINESS: The legal position is that if you have five or more employees you absolutely have to have a written health and safety policy and everybody needs to be aware of it.
Jane Markham - Podcats: That’s the bottom line. Toby Langford is a highly experienced Portfolio underwriter with MORE TH>N BUSINESS. So, Health and Safety - what do people running a small business need to know or do?
Toby: The classic situation is that you go out to a small commercial premises - perhaps a manufacturer or a distributor - and go through the reception to go and meet the proprietor of the business and see a poster on the wall and it says ‘Health and Safety at Work Act 1974’. And you get talking to your customer and you say ‘Do you have a Health and Safety policy?’ and they say ‘I’ve got the poster’.
Jane: Bingo!
Toby: But actually that’s not a Health and Safety policy. A Health and Safety policy is something that’s been written by you about your company and it sets out for your employees your attitude to Health and Safety - which is that, you know, you take it seriously. It also sets out who’s responsible for it....
Now the legal position is that if you have five or more employees you have to have a written Health and Safety policy and everyone needs to be aware of it. Jane: I can see people’s eyes glazing over because Health and Safety is a thing that really frightens people. There are so many things you have to think of... Toby: It’s actually surprising that once you start doing this it’s not as difficult as you think. I’ve seen examples of Health and Safety policies that were actually quite good and were actually on one page. A lot of them might stretch to five or six pages but it’s not a massive document, and it shouldn’t be, because it should be clear and concise.
For larger organisations you may well be giving out an employee handbook and it would be a chapter in the handbook but getting back to small businesses, the ones that More Th>n Business tend to concentrate on, it may well be that you just write a Word document that is just a few pages long.
To help you do this on our website we’ve actually got a risk management guide – a guide to producing a Health and Safety policy. And also, similar to that, we have a guide to producing Risk Assessments as well...
Risk Assessments are another area – another key area of Health and Safety - and, similar to a Health and Safety policy, if you have five or more employees it’s essential that you not only undertake Risk Assessments but that you record your findings.
The five steps to doing a risk assessment of your business:
Step One
The first thing you do is you go round and you have a look for hazards. So you’ll actually go round and look round your premises, or mentally visualise your premises, but it’s probably better to go and have a good look round and you’ll start to see straight away that you’ve got – electricity, you are perhaps using ladders, you might be using forklift trucks, there may be untidy areas in the workplace where people could trip over and basically you just keep going around your premises and making note of what the hazards are.
Step Two
The second thing that you’ll do is to think about who may be harmed and how may they be harmed and once you’ve done that...
Step Three
You need to evaluate that risk and actually think about, well, is this a major risk that is completely uncontrolled or is this a risk for which I’ve already got perfectly adequate controls in place – now?
Step Four
And the next thing is that, as I mentioned earlier, even if you’re a small company and it may not be a legal requirement for you to record your findings actually, once you’ve gone through this process it wouldn’t be too difficult just to write a line in a spreadsheet or in a word document saying that these are the risks I’ve looked at and these are the findings. And the next thing you do is that you communicate it - make sure all of your staff are aware.
Step five
And then the final thing to do – the fifth step to risk assessment - is to review. The last thing you want to do with a document like that is to put it in a drawer and forget about it for two years. Jane: From what you are saying you can do it yourself – you don’t need outside help to do this. Toby: There are consultants out there who could help you to do this but it is something that a small company could very very happily do for themselves. Jane: Reporting accidents. Toby : We’ve talked about Health and Safety Policies, we’ve talked about Risk Assessments, another key area of Health and Safety is making sure that you report any accidents. And, the piece of law that surrounds all this is called RIDDOR - which is the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences. And this is where I’m sure you’ve probably heard, or will probably think, ‘I think there’s a requirement somewhere for me to have an accident book’ – and you’re quite right there is. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an accident ‘book’, you may have another way of recording, but the key thing is that if someone gets hurt or there is any incident at your premises that you make a record of that. Jane: How much do you, as an insurer, have to take into account people’s Health and Safety Policies? Toby: It is important for insurance companies and it’s the sort of thing that you might want to tell an insurance company about – particularly if you’re very good at it, because that creates a very good impression. Because, for most of our commercial policies we’ll be offering some kind of liability insurance which means if your employees get injured at work then we are the ones that have to pay out when a settlement needs to be made. And similarly there will be some sort of public liability and we’re talking cover for employer’s liability that is usually 10 million pounds - so for a large incident that can be very costly for insurance companies. And usually for public liability you could be talking anything between 1 and 5 million arising from any one event. So it’s a great reassurance to an insurance company to hear that you are managing your Health and Safety! For more information on Health and Safety go to www.morethanbusiness.com
I’m Jane Markham and this is a Podcats production for MORE TH>N BUSINESS.
Now the legal position is that if you have five or more employees you have to have a written Health and Safety policy and everyone needs to be aware of it. Jane: I can see people’s eyes glazing over because Health and Safety is a thing that really frightens people. There are so many things you have to think of... Toby: It’s actually surprising that once you start doing this it’s not as difficult as you think. I’ve seen examples of Health and Safety policies that were actually quite good and were actually on one page. A lot of them might stretch to five or six pages but it’s not a massive document, and it shouldn’t be, because it should be clear and concise.
For larger organisations you may well be giving out an employee handbook and it would be a chapter in the handbook but getting back to small businesses, the ones that More Th>n Business tend to concentrate on, it may well be that you just write a Word document that is just a few pages long.
To help you do this on our website we’ve actually got a risk management guide – a guide to producing a Health and Safety policy. And also, similar to that, we have a guide to producing Risk Assessments as well...
Risk Assessments are another area – another key area of Health and Safety - and, similar to a Health and Safety policy, if you have five or more employees it’s essential that you not only undertake Risk Assessments but that you record your findings.
The five steps to doing a risk assessment of your business:
Step One
The first thing you do is you go round and you have a look for hazards. So you’ll actually go round and look round your premises, or mentally visualise your premises, but it’s probably better to go and have a good look round and you’ll start to see straight away that you’ve got – electricity, you are perhaps using ladders, you might be using forklift trucks, there may be untidy areas in the workplace where people could trip over and basically you just keep going around your premises and making note of what the hazards are.
Step Two
The second thing that you’ll do is to think about who may be harmed and how may they be harmed and once you’ve done that...
Step Three
You need to evaluate that risk and actually think about, well, is this a major risk that is completely uncontrolled or is this a risk for which I’ve already got perfectly adequate controls in place – now?
Step Four
And the next thing is that, as I mentioned earlier, even if you’re a small company and it may not be a legal requirement for you to record your findings actually, once you’ve gone through this process it wouldn’t be too difficult just to write a line in a spreadsheet or in a word document saying that these are the risks I’ve looked at and these are the findings. And the next thing you do is that you communicate it - make sure all of your staff are aware.
Step five
And then the final thing to do – the fifth step to risk assessment - is to review. The last thing you want to do with a document like that is to put it in a drawer and forget about it for two years. Jane: From what you are saying you can do it yourself – you don’t need outside help to do this. Toby: There are consultants out there who could help you to do this but it is something that a small company could very very happily do for themselves. Jane: Reporting accidents. Toby : We’ve talked about Health and Safety Policies, we’ve talked about Risk Assessments, another key area of Health and Safety is making sure that you report any accidents. And, the piece of law that surrounds all this is called RIDDOR - which is the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences. And this is where I’m sure you’ve probably heard, or will probably think, ‘I think there’s a requirement somewhere for me to have an accident book’ – and you’re quite right there is. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an accident ‘book’, you may have another way of recording, but the key thing is that if someone gets hurt or there is any incident at your premises that you make a record of that. Jane: How much do you, as an insurer, have to take into account people’s Health and Safety Policies? Toby: It is important for insurance companies and it’s the sort of thing that you might want to tell an insurance company about – particularly if you’re very good at it, because that creates a very good impression. Because, for most of our commercial policies we’ll be offering some kind of liability insurance which means if your employees get injured at work then we are the ones that have to pay out when a settlement needs to be made. And similarly there will be some sort of public liability and we’re talking cover for employer’s liability that is usually 10 million pounds - so for a large incident that can be very costly for insurance companies. And usually for public liability you could be talking anything between 1 and 5 million arising from any one event. So it’s a great reassurance to an insurance company to hear that you are managing your Health and Safety! For more information on Health and Safety go to www.morethanbusiness.com
I’m Jane Markham and this is a Podcats production for MORE TH>N BUSINESS.
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