Health and Safety in Belgium: 6 Duties That Attach From Your First Employee
Most countries phase their health and safety obligations in. A written assessment here, a committee at fifty, a specialist appointment somewhere in between. Belgium does not really work that way. A substantial part of the structure attaches the moment you employ one person, and the parts that scale later are additions to a framework that had to exist from the start.
For a Brussels office of eight people, that is counter-intuitive enough to be missed entirely. A law firm's representative office, a consultancy's EU affairs team, a fund manager's small local presence: all of them are subject to a structural requirement that a British or American parent would associate with a factory rather than a floor of desks.
Six obligations, ordered by when they bite.
1. An internal prevention service, from the first employee
The requirement that surprises people most, and the one with no British or American equivalent.
Under the Belgian welfare at work legislation, every employer must establish an internal service for prevention and protection at work, comprising at least one prevention advisor. Not at ten employees, not at fifty. From the first.
The service's function is to assist the employer, the hierarchical line and the workers in developing, programming, implementing and evaluating welfare policy. In small entities this is administratively light, but it is a structure rather than a task, and its absence is a structural defect rather than a missing document.
2. A prevention advisor, who may be you
Coupled to the above, and the point that makes it workable for a small office.
Where the undertaking employs fewer than twenty workers, the prevention advisor role may be performed by the employer personally. Above that, it must be someone else, with the competence requirements scaling by the size and risk profile of the undertaking.
For a foreign-owned entity this raises a practical question that is frequently answered badly. "The employer" in a Belgian subsidiary means the entity, and the person performing the role has to be genuinely positioned to do it, with the training obligations that go with it. Appointing a group health and safety manager in London to be the Belgian prevention advisor does not satisfy a requirement built around someone present in the undertaking.
The concept parallels the British competent person duty, but the Belgian version is a defined internal service with a named holder and reporting obligations attached.
3. Affiliation to an external service, also from the first employee
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Alongside the internal service, the employer must affiliate to an external service for prevention and protection at work, which supplies the specialisms the internal service cannot cover: occupational medicine, industrial hygiene, ergonomics and psychosocial expertise.
Most small and medium employers rely heavily on the external service in practice, which is entirely normal and is what the system anticipates. What is not acceptable is treating affiliation as an alternative to having the internal service. The two are complementary, and the division of tasks between them is supposed to be documented rather than assumed. Arinite's EDPBW overview covers how the external service fits into the wider picture.
4. A dynamic risk management system, not a one-off assessment
Belgium frames risk management as a continuous system rather than a document produced periodically.
The dynamic risk management system runs on a planning cycle: a global prevention plan setting the direction over a multi-year horizon, and an annual action plan translating it into the coming year's measures. The distinction from a UK-style risk assessment matters. You are not being asked to produce an assessment and review it. You are being asked to operate a planning cycle and to be able to show it turning.
Psychosocial risks sit inside this explicitly, covering violence, moral and sexual harassment at work, alongside safety, ergonomics and occupational hygiene. For a professional services or finance office where the meaningful risks are organisational rather than physical, this is where most of the substance lies.
5. Training and refresher obligations that recur
Several roles carry annual refresher requirements rather than one-off training, and this is the item most often allowed to lapse quietly.
First aiders, the confidential counsellor where one is appointed, and the internal prevention advisor are all expected to maintain their competence through periodic refresher training. In a small office, where the same person may hold more than one of these positions, the requirement is easy to satisfy and easy to forget, because nothing prompts you until something goes wrong.
There are also reporting obligations attached to the internal service, including an annual report submitted to the federal employment authority, which means the arrangement produces a paper trail whether or not anyone is inspecting.
6. The committee, at fifty workers
The threshold obligation, and the one most similar to what employers will recognise from elsewhere.
At fifty workers, a committee for prevention and protection at work must be established, and the employer is required to consult it before any significant decision concerning health and safety. Below fifty, consultation runs through the union delegation where one exists, and directly with workers where it does not.
The word to attend to is consult. As across much of continental Europe, this is not an obligation to inform after deciding, and a group that plans a change and presents it as settled has skipped the step rather than performed it. Where no committee exists, the obligation to consult does not disappear, it simply changes route.
What attaches when
| Trigger | Obligation | What foreign parents assume | |---|---|---| | First employee | Internal prevention service established | That a small office is below the threshold | | First employee | Prevention advisor appointed | That a group manager abroad can hold it | | First employee | Affiliation to an external service | That this replaces the internal service | | Ongoing | Dynamic risk management, global plan and annual action plan | That a one-off risk assessment suffices | | Ongoing | Refresher training for designated roles | That initial training was sufficient | | 50 workers | Committee for prevention and protection at work | That informing it is consulting it |
Read the right-hand column. Every one of those assumptions is reasonable if you are extrapolating from British or American practice, and every one is wrong in Belgium. The federal employment service publishes guidance on welfare at work, and the national knowledge centre sets out the prevention structures in detail.
Belgium in a group context
Brussels offices are typically small, senior and strategically important, which is precisely the combination that leads to them being overlooked by a group function allocating resource by headcount.
The neighbouring entities do not transfer either. A French entity requires a DUERP in prescribed format. A German entity requires a documented Gefährdungsbeurteilung. A Luxembourg entity requires a designated employee and, at fifteen people, an elected staff delegation. All descend from the same EU Framework Directive 89/391/EEC, and each member state built something different on top of it. EU-OSHA's overview of the Belgian national system is a reasonable orientation for a parent company.
Holding one group view while each entity satisfies its own national test is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone, and periodic health and safety audits confirm that the smallest entities were not quietly skipped.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite works with locally qualified practitioners in Belgium, so the internal service, the prevention advisor arrangement and the planning cycle are established under Belgian law while your group keeps one point of contact. 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 legal, professional services and finance and banking organisations, which describes a large share of what a Brussels presence consists of.
Our global health and safety consultants handle the surrounding jurisdictions that usually accompany a Belgian entity, and our international health and safety consultants can tell you what is outstanding locally. If your Brussels office has never appointed a prevention advisor, a free gap analysis will establish what closing that involves.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
