Health & Safety Consultancy

We can assist with completing a variety of risk assessments such as general workplace, task specific, manual handling, CoSHH, DSEAR, DSE, etc.
We can also provide templates and advice on how you can do this yourself, however we do advise that if you are conducting risk assessments, you must ensure you are competent to do so.

Every employer shall make and give effect to such arrangements as are appropriate, having regard to the nature of his activities and the size of his undertaking, for the effective planning, organisation, control, monitoring and review of the preventive and protective measures.

Where the employer employs five or more employees, he shall record the arrangements.

Whether you are a micro business, or have 5 or more employees, including directors, we can assist you with the development of your Health & Safety arrangements. This could be as simple as having a written H&S policy, or could include the development of detailed, individual policy arrangements and procedures for some of your particular business practices.

Safety inspections of the workplace can take many forms and serve a number of purposes, for example:

• safety tours – general inspections of the workplace 
• safety sampling – systematic sampling of particular dangerous activities, processes or areas
• safety surveys – general inspections of particular dangerous activities, processes or areas
• incident inspections – carried out after an accident causing a fatality, injury, or near miss, which could have resulted in an injury, or case of ill health and has been reported to the health and safety enforcing authority and;
• construction site inspections and CDM compliance inspections which relate to construction projects.

We can assist with any or all of these inspections to help ensure your arrangements are working as planned.

If you have a contractor working for you, then both you and the contractor will have duties under health and safety law to ensure the contractor’s competence. This also applies when a contractor employs subcontractors.

If you are contracting construction work you have duties as a client under the Construction Design and Management Regulations 2015 (CDM).

A client is anyone who has construction work carried out for them. Please see the CDM consultancy section of this website for more information relating to your duties under the CDM Regulations.

If you are engaging contractors to carry out works on your behalf, or using subcontractors on a construction project you are running, we can assist you to ensure your legal obligations are met and to ensure the contractor you are engaging is competent to carry out the work safely.

Positive Safety Solutions offers in-house H&S training in topics such as H&S awareness, fire safety awareness, manual handling, work at height awareness, COSHH awareness, etc. We also offer regulated qualifications in a variety of topics which can be found on our NVQ qualifications pages.

We can provide training both at your premises, provided you have adequate space and facilities available, or can organise a venue to facilitate the training you need.

In any business or organisation things don’t always go to plan. In the unfortunate event of an incident or Accident, Health & Safety investigations form an essential part of the monitoring process that you are required to carry out. Incidents, including near misses, can tell you a lot about how things actually are in reality. An investigation can help you identify why the existing risk control measures failed and what improvements or additional measures are needed so that you can ensure they do not reoccur.

The process involved in investigating serious accidents may involve:

• Inspection of the accident/incident location and recording of evidence
• Inspection of site health and safety documentation in relation to the accident/incident
• Taking witness statements
• Interviewing injured parties
• Preparation of a full report indicating the root causes of the accident/incident and any recommendations required

We can advise on accident investigation processes and procedures you can implement, or can carry out investigations on your behalf. 

As mentioned above, if you are engaging a contractor to carry out works for your business, you have a responsibility to ensure they are competent to do so. A process based on the requirements of PAS 91 known as PQQ and which includes a H&S section, consists of the contractor completing and submitting a questionnaire and supporting documents to the organisation, where they are reviewed against a standard and if successful, the contractor is added to an approved contractor list for a certain period, but usually no longer than 12 months. The process is complicated for the client organisation due to the H&S section, as the reviewer should be a H&S competent person to ensure the review is suitable and sufficient. If you are not familiar with it, the process can be confusing, frustrating and time consuming. 

Numerous large organisations that use hundreds, if not thousands of contractors, such as local authorities and private businesses, may not have the in-house resource to carry out the H&S section of the PQQ review on all of the contractors on their approved list, therefore they require contractors that wish to work for them, to hold an SSIP accreditation. This can be with any one of a number of SSIP providers such as Chas, SMAS, Constructionline, FASET, etc. A complete list of current providers can be found on the SSIP website linked above.

We are experienced in the SSIP process and can assist you to gain accreditation with your chosen provider, or multiple providers if you choose. Depending on the level and extent of your existing H&S management system, this can be as little as reviewing and updating some existing documents, up to providing almost all of the documentation and evidence you require to successfully get through the audit process.

Get in touch today and get your SSIP accreditation application rolling.

We offer a number of retained support packages we have developed called Simple Safety Support. These are more suitable for organisations that might be considered a ‘low risk’ industry, such as cleaning companies, office based works, retail businesses, etc.