Visitors and Reception: 7 Duties Offices Miss
Your building has a visitor book or a tablet, a badge printer, and someone at a desk who greets people. That arrangement was designed for security and for looking professional, and it works well for both.
It was not designed to discharge health and safety duties, and it is doing that job by accident. Two populations depend on it: the people who come into your building, and the people who sit at the front of it. Both are covered by duties most organisations have never articulated.
Seven of them.
1. You owe duties to people you do not employ
The foundation, and it is broader than most organisations assume.
Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires every employer to conduct its undertaking so as to ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, that persons not in its employment who may be affected are not exposed to risks. Section 4 adds a duty on those in control of premises made available as a place of work for people who are not their employees.
A client in a meeting room, a candidate at interview, an engineer attending a comms room and a courier in the lobby are all within that. The duty does not turn on whether they signed anything.
2. The visitor record is an evacuation record
The most consequential reframing in this article.
Article 15 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires procedures for serious and imminent danger and the nomination of sufficient competent persons to implement evacuation. Implementing an evacuation means knowing who was in the building.
Test your arrangement against that. Can somebody produce, within two minutes of an alarm, a list of visitors currently in the building and where they were going? Is that list accessible from the assembly point rather than from a machine at the desk you have just evacuated? Does anyone sign out reliably, or does the record steadily overstate?
A visitor system that captures arrivals well and departures badly produces a roll call that sends someone back into a building to look for a person who left at eleven.
3. Visitors need to know what to do, briefly
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Nobody wants a safety briefing on arrival at a law firm. Something short is still required.
The realistic minimum is the evacuation route from where they will be, the assembly point, and who is responsible for them. In most offices that responsibility sits with the host, and stating it explicitly changes behaviour: a host who knows they are accountable for their visitor in an evacuation will act, and one who has never been told will assume reception has it.
For visitors going somewhere with specific hazards, a laboratory, a plant room or a comms room, more is needed and it should be given by whoever is escorting them.
4. Ask about assistance, and mean it
The item almost universally missing.
Where a visitor would need assistance to evacuate, the arrangement in your building needs to accommodate that, and you will not know unless you ask. The question belongs in the invitation or the pre-registration step rather than at the desk, because asking someone in a lobby whether they can use stairs is both intrusive and too late.
This is the visitor version of the personal evacuation planning question, and the same principle applies: the people who would act need to know what to do, not the reason.
Where a visitor discloses something, that information is handled under data protection rules like any other, and the ICO's guidance for organisations covers the wider position on retention and access.
5. Contractors are visitors with extra duties attached
A distinction worth making at the desk.
Someone arriving to do work in your building is not the same as someone arriving for a meeting. Regulation 12 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires you to provide employers of visiting workers with comprehensible information on risks and emergency procedures.
In practice that means a short induction rather than a badge: evacuation procedure, restricted areas, electrical isolation points, who to contact, and anything unusual about the building. Where the work could disturb the fabric of an older building, the asbestos information duty applies before anyone starts.
A visitor system that treats a maintenance engineer identically to a client has missed a duty.
6. Front-of-house staff face risks the assessment ignores
Turning to the second population, and the one that goes unassessed.
Reception is the point at which anyone unhappy with your organisation arrives, and the person there is visible, alone at a fixed position, and unable to leave. Aggression from members of the public, from clients under pressure and from people who should not be in the building is a foreseeable feature of the role rather than an aberration. HSE publishes guidance on violence at work.
The controls are practical: a way to summon help that does not require a phone call, a clear line of sight, an escape route behind the desk that is not blocked by storage, arrangements for opening and closing when the person is alone in the building, and a clear position that staff may withdraw.
The forthcoming preventative duty on harassment, and third-party liability from October 2026, reach this directly. Reception is where third-party conduct happens most often, and it is where an organisation is least likely to have anticipated it.
7. Lone working, and the hours nobody checks
The reception role frequently starts before everyone else and ends after them.
That means opening a building alone, being alone during quiet periods, and being the last person out. Each of those is a lone working arrangement, and it usually exists without anyone deciding it should. Check-in arrangements, a stated position on what to do if someone will not leave, and clarity on whether the person may lock up alone are the practical elements.
Checking your arrangement
| Element | Question | Common finding |
|---|---|---|
| Duty recognised | Are visitors in your risk assessment at all? | No |
| Evacuation list | Retrievable at the assembly point within two minutes? | On a machine inside the building |
| Sign-out | Reliable, or does the record overstate? | Overstates |
| Briefing | Do visitors know the route and who is responsible? | Assumed |
| Assistance | Asked in advance, discreetly? | Never asked |
| Contractors | Distinguished, and inducted? | Same process as a client |
| Reception risks | Aggression, alarm, escape route, withdrawal position | Not assessed |
| Lone working | Opening, closing and quiet periods addressed | Not recognised as lone working |
The second and third rows together produce the outcome that matters. An overstated list is worse than no list, because it directs a search for someone who is not there.
For multi-site and international groups
Two additional considerations.
Where your people work in buildings you do not control, they are the visitors, and the same duties fall on the occupier towards them. Asking what a client site or a coworking operator does about evacuation accounting is a reasonable question to ask on their behalf.
And front-of-house risks are treated as regulated psychosocial matters in a growing number of jurisdictions rather than as a facilities question. Chile requires prevention protocols expressly covering violence from clients and users. Sweden and Denmark address the organisational working environment directly. Australia treats psychosocial hazards within the same framework as physical ones. A group standard for reception written to the British position will be short in those entities.
Holding assessments and incidents from 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 arrangement against how the building actually operates.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite assesses the parts of an office that were designed for another purpose and ended up carrying safety duties, which describes most visitor arrangements. 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 professional services organisations, where client visits are constant and front-of-house is the first point of contact.
Where offices span several countries, our global health and safety consultants establish what each jurisdiction requires, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current.
If your fire drill has never tested whether visitors were accounted for, a free gap analysis will identify what else the arrangement is not doing.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
