After the Deal: 9 Health and Safety Gaps Post-Completion
Health and safety gets a reasonable amount of attention during an acquisition. A diligence workstream, a report, a schedule of findings, occasionally a price adjustment.
Then completion happens, the deal team moves on, and the findings go into a folder. The integration programme concerns itself with systems, brand, finance and people, and the health and safety questions become somebody's third priority behind two urgent ones.
That gap matters because the duties do not phase in. From completion, the acquiring group's obligations attach to entities and premises it has never assessed, staffed by people it has never trained, in buildings it has not seen.
Nine gaps, and the first opens on day one.
1. The duty attaches immediately, the knowledge does not
Start with the timing mismatch.
Section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and regulation 3 of the Management Regulations attach to employers in respect of their employees. Where a share purchase leaves the entity intact, its own duties continue and the group inherits the exposure. Where a business transfers, the receiving employer takes on people whose working arrangements it has not assessed.
Diligence tells you what was true during a few weeks of scrutiny, usually through documents rather than site visits. The first ninety days after completion is when that becomes a real position rather than a report.
Where employees transfer, the employment framework brings its own consultation and information obligations, and those run alongside the safety ones rather than replacing them.
2. Two policies, and nobody has said which applies
The simplest gap and the most common.
Both organisations have a health and safety policy. Both name people. Both describe arrangements. Neither describes the combined organisation, and until somebody decides, managers in the acquired business will follow the one they know.
The decision is not automatically to impose the acquirer's policy. The acquired business may have arrangements better suited to its actual activities, particularly where it does something the acquirer does not. What matters is that a decision is made, communicated and dated.
3. Two competent persons, or none
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Regulation 7 requires the appointment of one or more competent persons to assist in complying with statutory duties.
After a deal there are usually two arrangements, and frequently one of them is a person who has just accepted a settlement and is working a notice period. Named safety roles concentrate in individuals: the competent person, the fire risk assessment holder, the first aiders, the fire wardens, the person who deals with the landlord.
Establish who currently holds each role in the acquired business, and who holds it in ninety days. That is a list, and it takes an afternoon.
4. Two providers, two contracts, two renewal dates
An administrative gap with a practical consequence.
Both businesses may have external providers: a consultancy, an occupational health provider, a fire risk assessor, a training supplier. Consolidating them is a normal integration task and is rarely urgent enough to happen quickly.
The risk in the interim is a gap rather than duplication. Where a contract lapses on a renewal date nobody is tracking, the service stops and nobody notices until something needs doing.
5. The assessments describe a company that no longer exists
Where the acquired business is reorganised, and it usually is.
Teams merge, sites consolidate, people move buildings, reporting lines change and headcount adjusts. Each of those is a significant change requiring review, and the assessments in the folder describe the pre-deal organisation.
The practical trigger list is short: any move, any consolidation, any change to working patterns, and any change to who supervises whom.
6. Shared and transitional premises
The physical gap, and it is specific to the post-deal period.
Integration frequently produces temporary arrangements: acquired staff working in the acquirer's building before contracts are settled, the acquirer's people embedded in the acquired site, shared space during a transition, or a transitional services arrangement where one party provides facilities to the other.
Regulation 11 requires employers who share a workplace to cooperate, coordinate their measures and inform each other of the risks. During a transition that duty is live and the arrangements are usually informal.
7. The overseas entities nobody looked at
The gap that grows with the size of the deal.
Diligence tends to concentrate on the principal jurisdiction and on the largest sites. A target with a dozen people in each of four countries will have been treated as immaterial, and those entities are precisely where obligations attach at low headcounts.
As covered throughout this series, appointment and service duties attach from the first employee in Belgium, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Greece, filings fall due on fixed dates in Bulgaria and Estonia, and directors carry personal duties in Australia, Korea, New Zealand and South Africa. A small overseas entity acquired without local advice is a live exposure, not a rounding error.
8. Records, retention and what you have actually inherited
The evidential gap.
You have inherited the acquired business's history: its incidents, its claims, its assessments, its training records and its correspondence with regulators and landlords. Some of it will be needed years later, given the limitation position on personal injury claims and the long retention periods attaching to health records.
Two practical steps. Establish where those records physically are, because in a share deal they may sit on systems being decommissioned. And establish whether any enforcement action, notice or open claim exists that diligence did not surface.
9. Two cultures, and the reporting data will mislead you
The gap that lasts longest.
Reporting rates reflect culture rather than incident frequency, so combining two organisations produces a data set you cannot read straight. If the acquired business reported little, that is more likely to indicate that people did not report than that nothing happened.
Expect reporting to fall further in the months after a deal, for the same reason it falls during a restructure: nobody wants to raise problems while their position is uncertain. Read a decline as a signal about confidence rather than performance, and restate the protections for raising concerns early rather than late.
The nine, in short
| Gap | Usual position | First action |
|---|---|---|
| Duty timing | Findings filed | Treat the first 90 days as the assessment |
| Two policies | Neither withdrawn | Decide, communicate, date it |
| Competent persons | Two, or one leaving | List the named roles and their holders |
| Providers | Duplicated | Track renewal dates before consolidating |
| Assessments | Describe the old company | Review on every move and merge |
| Transitional premises | Informal | Written coordination during the transition |
| Overseas entities | Immaterial in diligence | Confirm local obligations per entity |
| Records | Assumed transferred | Locate them before systems are retired |
| Culture and data | Read as performance | Read as confidence; restate protections |
Row three is the fastest to close and the most conspicuous if something happens in the interim. Row seven is the one most likely to produce a genuine compliance failure.
For acquisitive groups
Two observations for organisations that do this repeatedly.
Build it into the integration playbook rather than the diligence checklist. The diligence question is what we are buying. The integration question is what we now owe, and to whom, from when. Groups that acquire regularly benefit far more from a standard ninety-day checklist than from a longer diligence report.
Assume the smallest entities carry the most unmet obligations. That is counterintuitive and it holds consistently, because thresholds attach at low headcounts in many jurisdictions and small entities are the least likely to have had local advice.
Holding the position for every entity in one register, so that an acquisition adds rows rather than creating a parallel system, is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone. Periodic health and safety audits are how an acquired entity gets examined properly for the first time, and HSE's framework for managing health and safety describes the cycle both organisations should end up inside.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite works in the period after completion, when the duties are live and the knowledge has not caught up. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with finance and banking, insurance and IT and software organisations, both as acquirers and as the businesses being integrated.
Where a target brings entities in several countries, our global health and safety consultants establish what attaches in each one, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current as the group consolidates.
If you completed an acquisition in the last year and nobody has visited the acquired sites, a free gap analysis is the right place to start.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
