Under The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 – Regulation 7, you must appoint one or more competent persons to assist you with your health and safety measures. There are a few different ways of appointing a health and safety advisor.

The three ways of doing this are:

1. Employ a health and safety manager in your business. They can spend all of their time helping your business with your health and safety. Still, they might not have the breadth of knowledge needed for all of your business activity. This can also be an expensive option for many businesses and perhaps doesn’t warrant someone full time.

2. Give it to someone in-house and hope for the best. This can work, but they will need some support. This is something Saxon Safety can offer, to help get them up to speed and be a source of competent advice for more complex issues. Giving it to someone on top of their existing workload, without support, can be very overwhelming. Ultimately, this can just be paying lip service to it.

3. Outsource to an expert outside agency with a team, with an extensive breadth and depth of knowledge and let them take care of it. They will still need input from you, but they can make sure you spend your time dealing with the significant risks, and not filling out endless checksheets for low-risk activities, as is often the way with some of the larger subscriptions services.

Whatever route you think is the right one for your business, you should make sure that the people carrying out the work have the skills, knowledge experience and training to carry out the work properly, as was as the organizational capability.

Important Factors

Whatever route you take, and whoever you use, please make sure of the following few points:

· They’re qualified (OSHCR registration is a good indicator of qualification level or other appropriate body)

· Have demonstrable experience in your sector.

· They have the time to take on your work

· Have the right resources to take on your work

· Ask for examples of similar previous projects

· Check their insurance!

Saxon Safety is led by a Chartered Member of IOSH, who also holds Certified membership of the Association for Project Safety, Institute of fire engineers membership, and is an OSHCR registered consultant as well as being a Lifting Appointed Person, in the team we have construction experts, fire experts, O+M experts, and site-inspection specialists. The whole team undertake a programme of continuous professional development to make sure we are always up to date with legislation and best practice. As well as our work in engineering and manufacturing, we don’t believe there is a health and safety consultancy who offer what we can across the construction sector. We advise Principal Designers, Principal Contractors, Clients, Contractors and Designers with their CDM duties on a variety of projects. Get in touch to see how we can help you.

We hope this helps you find the right source of competent advice for your business. We have a strong track record of supporting a range of businesses across an array of industries in different ways. If you need a health and safety advisor, please get in touch to see how we can help you!