Secondments and Client-Site Working: 7 Questions on Who Carries the Duty
A lawyer is embedded in a client's in-house team for nine months. A consultant sits at a customer's head office four days a week. A loss adjuster spends most of the year on other people's premises. An engineer is on site at a customer's facility commissioning an install.
In every case the employer's instinct is the same: they are working at the client's site, so the client's arrangements apply. That instinct is wrong in a specific and expensive way. The duty does not transfer. It multiplies. Both organisations now hold obligations towards the same person, neither can discharge the other's, and in most placements nobody has written down who is doing what.
Professional services firms carry more of this exposure than almost anyone, because sending people into other organisations is the business model. Seven questions settle it.
1. Does the duty transfer to the host organisation?
No, and this is the misunderstanding everything else follows from.
Section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 places a duty on the employer towards its own employees, and that duty is not delegable. It follows your people wherever they work. Meanwhile section 3 places a duty on the host towards persons not in its employment who may be affected by its undertaking, which captures your seconded employee squarely.
The result is two concurrent duties, not one transferred duty. A clause in the engagement letter stating that the client is responsible for health and safety on its premises allocates commercial risk between the parties. It does not affect either party's statutory position, and a regulator will not treat it as though it does.
2. Who assesses the risk of a placement you do not control?
You still do. Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires you to assess the risks to your employees, and the fact that the risks arise on someone else's floor does not remove the requirement.
That does not mean surveying the client's building. It means assessing the placement: what the person will be doing, where, for how long, what the host's arrangements are, and whether anything about the arrangement creates exposure your own workplace would not. Ask for the host's relevant assessments, form a view on whether they cover your person's actual activity, and record that view. The document you need is short. Its absence is what gets noticed.
3. What must each side tell the other?
Need Expert H&S Guidance?
Our qualified consultants can help you implement the right health & safety measures for your business.
This is set out more clearly than most employers realise. Regulation 11 of the same Regulations requires employers who share a workplace to co-operate and co-ordinate their arrangements. Regulation 12 then requires the host to provide employers of visiting workers with comprehensible information on the risks and on the emergency procedures, and requires you to pass that information to your people.
In practice, the information flows in both directions and usually stalls in one. Hosts are generally willing to send an induction pack. Employers are generally poor at telling the host anything about their own person: a mobility limitation, a medical condition relevant in an evacuation, a lone-working restriction. The host cannot accommodate what it does not know.
4. Does the host's induction discharge your training duty?
Only partly, and the split is worth being precise about.
Site-specific matters belong to the host: evacuation routes, assembly points, permit systems, local hazards, who the first aiders are. General competence for the work belongs to you, and it travels with the person. Neither substitutes for the other, and a placement is properly evidenced only when both are recorded.
Where the person will hold any safety-relevant function during the placement, check how that interacts with your own arrangements and with whoever holds your competent person duty. Long placements have a habit of quietly relocating responsibilities nobody formally moved.
5. Who reports it when someone is injured?
The question that most often gets answered incorrectly under time pressure.
Under RIDDOR, the responsible person for a reportable injury to an employee is that person's employer, wherever the injury happened. So when your seconded lawyer is injured at a client's office, your firm makes the report, not the client. If a non-employee is injured, responsibility sits with the person in control of the premises, which is why the same incident can look like the host's report from one side and yours from the other.
Agree this before the placement starts, not during it. HSE guidance on reportable incidents sets out the categories and the timeframes, and the timeframes are short enough that working out who reports while the clock runs is not a viable plan.
6. What changes when the placement is overseas?
Cross-border placements bring the host country's duties into play, and those duties attach to the workplace rather than to your incorporation.
A German host is subject to section 8 of the Arbeitsschutzgesetz, which requires employers sharing a workplace to co-ordinate, and sits within the DGUV prevention framework. A French host maintains a DUERP that should reflect the presence of external workers. All of these descend from the EU Framework Directive 89/391/EEC, which addresses shared workplaces directly, but the documentation and the enforcement differ in each state.
Your own duty to your employee does not diminish because they are abroad. It becomes harder to evidence, which is where global health and safety consultants tend to get called after the fact rather than before.
7. What does a long placement change that a short visit does not?
A two-day visit and a twelve-month secondment are different arrangements wearing the same label.
Over a long placement the person acquires a workstation they use daily, so a DSE assessment at the host desk becomes your responsibility rather than a formality. They absorb the host's workload patterns, including its peak periods, which brings stress exposure you neither designed nor monitor. They may work outside core hours in a building whose lone-working arrangements they have never been told about. And they gradually disappear from your own systems: the induction was logged, and nothing since.
Set a review point. Six months is a reasonable default, sooner if the role or the site changes.
Who does what: the short version
| Scenario | Your duty | Host duty | |---|---|---| | Placement risk assessment | Assess the placement and the activity | Provide its own assessments on request | | Site induction | Ensure it happened and record it | Deliver site-specific content | | General competence and training | Yours entirely | None | | Information about the individual | Disclose what the host needs to know | Act on what it is told | | Reportable injury to your employee | You report | Co-operate and preserve evidence | | Reportable injury to a host employee | Co-operate | They report | | Overseas placement | Duty continues unchanged | Host-country instrument applies | | Placement over six months | Review DSE, stress, lone working | Treat as a regular occupant |
Two duties, one person, and a short written record of who is doing what. That record takes an hour to produce at the start of a placement and is close to impossible to construct afterwards.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite works with firms whose people spend most of their time on other organisations' premises, which is the normal condition in legal, professional services and insurance. 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 build placement arrangements that stand up without generating paperwork nobody reads, and where placements cross borders our international health and safety consultants confirm what the host country actually requires.
Keeping placement records current across dozens of concurrent secondments is a tracking problem before it is a compliance problem, which is where health and safety consultants and software work better in combination, and periodic health and safety audits confirm the arrangements still match reality.
If your people regularly work at client sites and you are not certain what you would produce if asked, a free gap analysis will establish where the gaps are before an incident does.
Related Articles
Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
