Lone Working Risk Assessment: 11 Things It Has to Identify
Most organisations that ask us for a lone working risk assessment are asking for the wrong document, and the HSE says so in plain terms.
Its guidance in INDG73 states that there is no legal requirement to conduct a specific, separate risk assessment for lone workers. What there is instead is a duty to include risks to lone workers in your general risk assessment, and to take steps to avoid or control those risks.
That distinction matters for two reasons. It saves you producing a standalone document nobody reads, and more importantly it changes where the gaps are. A separate lone working assessment tends to describe a category of worker. A general assessment that properly covers lone working has to deal with specific people, specific places and specific hours, which is harder and considerably more useful.
It also widens the population. The HSE defines a lone worker as someone who works by themselves without close or direct supervision, and its examples include people who work separately from others on the same premises or outside normal working hours, and people who work at home. On that definition most professional offices have lone workers every week, and most have never written anything down about it.
Here are eleven things the assessment has to identify.
Scope and record
1. Who in your organisation is actually a lone worker. Apply the definition rather than the job title. In the sort of organisations we work with, it catches the person finishing a bid at nine in the evening, the facilities assistant in the building before anyone else, a surveyor or agent attending a property alone, an employee working from home, and anyone on a floor the rest of the team has left.
The HSE also notes that ways of working are changing with automation and greater use of technology, and that people are working until they are older, so the population is not static.
2. It goes in the general assessment, not a separate one. The point above, restated because it determines the deliverable. Lone working is a factor that modifies other risks rather than a risk in its own right, which is why it belongs inside the assessment that already covers the task.
3. What the record has to contain. The HSE sets out that if you employ five or more workers you must write down what you have found, and that the record should include the hazards, how they may harm people, and what you are already doing to control the risks. It must be reviewed and updated if anything changes. Our note on individual risk assessments covers the person-specific layer that often sits alongside this.
4. That the responsibility stays with you. The guidance is blunt on this: you are responsible for the health, safety and welfare of all your workers, including contractors, volunteers and self-employed people, and these responsibilities cannot be transferred to any other person, including to those people who work alone.
That last clause is the one to read twice. A lone worker consenting to work alone, or being told to use their own judgement, does not move the duty.
The four risk areas the HSE names
The guidance names specific areas to assess, and these four are where office-based organisations are thinnest.
5. Violence. The risk that a lone worker faces aggression with nobody present to help. For our clients this is most live where employees attend premises alone, deal with the public at a reception out of hours, or visit homes. Our note on property viewings deals with the lone attendance version, and visitors and reception with the front-of-house version.
6. Manual handling. Named explicitly, and obvious once stated. A load that two people would move together becomes a different risk when one person decides to move it alone because nobody else is there. Archive boxes and equipment moves are the usual culprits, and our note on archive and storage rooms covers the room itself.
7. The medical suitability of the individual to work alone. The HSE lists this as an area of risk to assess, and it is the item almost no office assessment contains.
It has to be handled carefully and proportionately, because it is personal information and it concerns the individual rather than the task. But the question is legitimate: is this particular person suitable to be in this building, or at this property, without anyone else present. Answering it properly usually means a confidential conversation and occupational health input rather than a form.
8. Whether the workplace itself presents a risk. A building behaves differently when it is nearly empty. Lifts, stairwells, plant rooms, basements, car parks and the route from the door to the car at eleven at night are all part of the assessment, and so is whether the building's systems are even active. Reduced lighting, a security system in a different mode and a locked reception are environmental changes the daytime assessment never considered.
Controls, supervision and review
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9. Involve the workers. The guidance requires involving workers when considering potential risks and the measures to control them. This is not a courtesy. The people who actually work late know which door sticks, which stairwell is unlit and which client visit makes them uneasy, and none of that appears in an assessment written at a desk.
10. Decide the level of supervision, and whether the work can be done alone at all. The HSE states that risk assessment should help you decide the right level of supervision for lone workers, and that there are some higher-risk activities where at least one other person may need to be present. Its examples include work in a confined space, where a supervisor may be needed along with someone dedicated to the rescue role, work near exposed live electricity conductors, diving operations, vehicles carrying explosives and fumigation.
Most of those will not arise in an office. The useful transfer is the principle: the output of the assessment can legitimately be that a particular task is not done alone. Alongside this sit instruction, training and supervision, and systems to keep in touch with the lone worker and respond to any incident.
11. Review it, and consult the other employer where the work is on their site. Two requirements that get missed together. Assessments must be reviewed periodically and updated after any significant changes, such as new staff, processes or equipment. And where the lone worker is working at another employer's workplace, you must consult that employer to identify any risks and the required control measures.
For a consultancy, law firm or software business whose people work at client sites, that second requirement is a standing obligation rather than an occasional one, and almost nobody does it in writing.
The eleven, and what good looks like
| What to identify | What we usually find |
|---|---|
| Who meets the definition | Only field staff listed, not late or home workers |
| That it sits in the general assessment | A standalone document nobody uses |
| The record: hazards, harm, controls | Hazards listed, controls assumed |
| That the duty cannot be transferred | Reliance on the worker's own judgement |
| Violence | Absent for out-of-hours and visits |
| Manual handling | Assessed for teams, not for one person |
| Medical suitability to work alone | Not considered at all |
| Whether the building itself adds risk | Daytime assessment reused |
| Worker involvement | Written at a desk |
| Level of supervision, and no-lone-working tasks | No task ever ruled out |
| Review, and consulting the other employer | Neither done |
Rows seven and eleven are the two that are almost always missing, and both are cheap. Row four is the one that matters most if something goes wrong.
Holding this alongside the people it applies to, with review dates, check-in arrangements and the client sites your people attend, is a practical case for health and safety consultants and software working as one system, because the lone working population changes with every project and every new hire. Periodic health and safety audits should test it in one move: ask who was alone in the building last week and what the arrangement was.
Two adjacent points worth keeping in the same place. The assessment should take account of normal work and foreseeable emergencies such as fire, equipment failure, illness and accidents, which is the question of what happens when something goes wrong and nobody is there. And lone working interacts with the psychosocial picture, because isolation, long hours and unsupported decisions are themselves a risk to health, which our note on work-related stress covers. Our notes on the sections a lone working policy needs and lone working in tech and AI deal with the policy and the sector picture, and the accident book with what gets recorded afterwards.
How this travels across an international estate
For groups with people working alone in several countries, lone working is an area where the British approach is unusually principles-based, and that cuts both ways.
The British position is that there is no lone working regulation at all. The duties come from the general law, the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act and regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, and the HSE's lone working guidance fills the space. There is no prescribed check-in interval, no mandated device and no list of prohibited solo tasks beyond the handful of higher-risk examples.
Several other jurisdictions are more directive. Some prohibit solo working on defined activities outright rather than leaving it to assessment, some require a documented means of raising an alarm for defined categories of worker, and some attach lone working to the occupational health service and its periodic examinations rather than treating it as a pure risk assessment question. Where a works council or employee representative body exists, the arrangement is also frequently something that has to be agreed rather than simply implemented.
So the exportable parts are the method and the population register. The prohibited tasks, the alarm requirement and whoever has to agree the arrangement are local, and a group standard that says "assess it" will be thinner than several jurisdictions require.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite does not sell lone worker devices or monitoring services, which means we have no reason to recommend one. What our health and safety consultants do is work out who in your organisation actually meets the definition, build the lone working factors into the assessments that already exist rather than creating another document, and settle the two questions that decide everything: what the check-in arrangement is, and which tasks are not done alone. We support 1,500+ businesses in 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years.
We work extensively with office-based, legal, insurance, IT and software, education and property and real estate clients, where lone working is mostly invisible because it happens at the edges of the day rather than in a defined field role. Our international guide to lone worker safety covers the wider picture, and our note on hot desking and hybrid teams covers the homeworking population this now overlaps with.
For multi-country groups, our global health and safety consultants apply the local prohibitions and alarm requirements rather than exporting the British assessment-only model, and our international health and safety consultants can tell you which countries restrict solo working by rule.
Ask one question this week. Who was alone in our building, or at a client site, after seven o'clock last week, and what was the arrangement for them. Then book a free gap analysis and we will tell you in one call which of the eleven your assessment already covers.
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Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
