Office Welfare Facilities: 7 Requirements and the Hybrid Problem
Nobody commissions a health and safety review to ask about toilets. It comes up during a fit-out, when a landlord is being pressed on service charge, or about three weeks after an attendance mandate takes effect and the queues start.
By that point the arithmetic has already gone wrong, and the arithmetic is the whole issue. Welfare requirements are among the few in health and safety with numbers attached, and those numbers are driven by how many people are actually present rather than by how many are employed.
Seven requirements, and the reason hybrid working has quietly broken most of them.
1. Sanitary conveniences, and the numbers behind them
Regulation 20 of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 requires suitable and sufficient sanitary conveniences at readily accessible places.
The regulation states the principle. The numbers sit in the supporting approved code of practice, L24, which sets out how provision should scale with the number of people at work, and distinguishes facilities used by men and women from those provided separately.
Two points about the arithmetic. It is based on the maximum number of people likely to be at work at any one time, not on headcount. And the requirement is for suitable and sufficient provision, so the code's figures are the practical benchmark rather than a ceiling: a building where queues form at predictable times is not providing sufficiently, whatever the table says.
2. Washing facilities have to match
Regulation 21 requires suitable and sufficient washing facilities, including showers where the nature of the work requires them, in readily accessible places.
For an office the substance is straightforward: facilities in the immediate vicinity of the conveniences, with clean running hot and cold or warm water, soap or other suitable means of cleaning, and a means of drying. Rooms containing them must be sufficiently ventilated and lit and kept clean.
The provision that most often fails in practice is the drying arrangement and the consumables, which are a cleaning contract issue rather than a design one. That makes it a contractor management question as much as a facilities one.
3. Drinking water is a separate requirement
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Regulation 22 requires an adequate supply of wholesome drinking water, readily accessible at suitable places, and conspicuously marked where necessary. A supply of cups or a drinking fountain must be provided unless the supply is in a jet from which people can drink easily.
The point worth checking is accessibility across the whole occupied area rather than at one point. A single tap on the ground floor of a five-floor demise is a supply, not a readily accessible one.
4. Somewhere to eat, and somewhere to rest
Regulation 25 requires suitable and sufficient rest facilities at readily accessible places, and facilities for eating meals where food eaten in the workplace would otherwise be likely to become contaminated.
Two features are worth attention in a modern office. Rest facilities must include arrangements to protect non-smokers from discomfort caused by tobacco smoke, and the practical question now extends to vaping, which is a policy decision most organisations have not taken formally.
And a break area that doubles as a meeting overflow space, or a kitchen that is also the printer room, is not obviously a rest facility. Where every soft-seating area in a building is bookable, people have nowhere to go that is not a work setting, which is a wellbeing question as well as a compliance one.
5. Rest facilities for pregnant workers and nursing mothers
Regulation 25A requires suitable rest facilities to be provided for pregnant women and nursing mothers, where necessary including facilities to lie down.
This is a specific and separate requirement, and it is among the most commonly unmet in professional offices, because a room that is nominally available is frequently a bookable meeting room with a glass wall.
What is needed is a space that is genuinely private, genuinely available without negotiation, and known about. Where an organisation also expects nursing mothers to express milk at work, that requires appropriate facilities and storage, which is a practical arrangement rather than a legal formality but follows directly from the same duty.
6. Clothing storage and changing
Regulation 23 requires suitable and sufficient accommodation for clothing not worn during working hours, with security and drying where appropriate.
In an office this looks minor until the building has a cycle-to-work population, at which point storage, drying and changing arrangements become a real constraint, and one that interacts with the storage of personal electric vehicles and batteries discussed elsewhere in this series.
7. The hybrid problem, which breaks all of the above
The reason this article exists rather than being a footnote.
Every requirement above scales with the number of people present at any one time. Two things have changed that number in most organisations, and they have changed it in opposite directions.
Many firms reduced their footprint during the hybrid years, giving up floors while keeping or growing headcount. Then attendance mandates concentrated the remaining population onto specified core days. The result is a building with fewer facilities and a higher peak occupancy than it has ever had, which is precisely the combination the arithmetic cannot absorb.
Assess against the mandated peak rather than the average. Occupancy, ventilation, fire strategy and first aid cover all need recalculating alongside welfare when an attendance mandate takes effect.
Checking your position
| Requirement | The question | Common finding |
|---|---|---|
| Sanitary conveniences | Sufficient for the maximum present at one time? | Assessed against headcount, or never |
| Washing | Matching provision, consumables maintained? | Consumables fail, not the design |
| Drinking water | Readily accessible across the whole demise? | One point, several floors |
| Rest and eating | A genuine rest space, not a bookable room? | Every space is a work setting |
| Pregnant and nursing | Private, available, known about? | Nominally available meeting room |
| Clothing storage | Adequate, including for cyclists? | Outgrown |
| Peak occupancy | Assessed against mandated core days? | Assessed against the old pattern |
The first and last rows are the same question asked twice, and answering it properly resolves most of the others.
In leased and serviced buildings
Welfare facilities are usually provided by the landlord or operator and used by your employees, which splits the duty in the familiar way.
The provision is theirs. The obligation to ensure your employees have suitable and sufficient facilities is yours, and it does not transfer with the lease. Where your occupancy pattern changes materially, particularly through an attendance mandate, that is a conversation to have with the operator in writing rather than an assumption to make.
Ask what the building's facilities were designed to support, what its current total occupancy is, and how that is changing across other tenants. A building where three tenants all mandate the same core days has a shared problem nobody has coordinated.
For international groups
Welfare requirements are set nationally and are among the more prescriptive obligations in many jurisdictions, frequently with explicit numerical tables that differ from the British ones.
A group fit-out standard is useful for consistency and does not establish compliance anywhere. The workable pattern is a group specification describing what good looks like, verified locally against each country's requirement, particularly where you are refitting or relocating.
Holding assessments and findings for every site in one register is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone, and periodic health and safety audits test the building as occupied rather than as designed.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite assesses buildings against how they are actually used, which for welfare provision is the only assessment that means anything. 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, finance and banking and IT and software organisations, most of them occupying space they do not control.
Where offices span several countries, our global health and safety consultants establish what each jurisdiction prescribes, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current as you refit or relocate.
If your organisation reduced its floorspace and then mandated attendance, a free gap analysis will tell you whether the building can absorb it.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
