Volunteers and Health and Safety: 13 Duties That Still Apply
A charity, a school with a parent helper rota, a university with student ambassadors, a museum with weekend guides. Somebody asks whether health and safety law covers volunteers, and gets one of two wrong answers.
The first wrong answer is that volunteers are covered exactly like staff. The second is that they are not covered at all, because they are not employees and the Health and Safety at Work Act is about employees.
The truth is more awkward than either. Section 2 of the Act, the employer duty everything else is built around, genuinely does not reach a volunteer, because a volunteer is not an employee. And a great deal of other law does reach them, including some that surprises organisations: a set of regulations bites on equipment you hand a volunteer even when they are not under your direct control, and the insurance policy you are legally obliged to hold does not cover them at all.
Here are thirteen duties that still apply, grouped by where they come from.
Instead of the employer duty
1. Section 3 does the work section 2 cannot. Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires an employer to conduct its undertaking in such a way as to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that persons not in its employment who may be affected are not exposed to risks to their health or safety. A volunteer working in your undertaking is squarely such a person.
This is not a weaker duty. It is a differently framed one, and it is the limb most prosecutions of charities and education bodies proceed under.
2. The premises duty applies on its own terms. Section 4 places duties on anyone in control of premises used by people who are not their employees, covering the premises, the means of access and egress and any plant or substance there. A volunteer in your building engages it regardless of what the arrangement is called.
3. Volunteers belong in the risk assessment. The assessment duty requires risks to be assessed for people not in employment as well as employees, and the HSE is explicit in its guidance on volunteers that you must include volunteers in your risk assessment. Its note on doing so adds the principle that matters most: volunteers doing similar work at the same level of risk should get the same protection as employees.
That sentence is the practical answer to most questions in this area. If a volunteer and a paid member of staff are doing the same task, the protection should not differ because the payroll does.
4. Occupiers' liability sits alongside the criminal duties. Section 2 of the Occupiers' Liability Act 1957 imposes a common duty of care to all visitors, to take such care as is reasonable to see that the visitor is reasonably safe in using the premises for the purposes for which they are invited. Criminal and civil exposure run in parallel here, and a volunteer injury commonly produces both questions.
What applies to the activity itself
5. Equipment regulations reach equipment you provide. This is the one organisations do not expect. The HSE states that the work equipment regulations apply where an employer provides equipment to volunteers, even where those volunteers are not under the employer's direct control. So a ladder, a trolley, a pressure washer or a catering appliance handed to a volunteer brings the full suitability, maintenance and inspection regime with it.
6. Work at height rules apply to the work. The HSE cites the Work at Height Regulations 2005 in its volunteer guidance, and the volunteer putting up bunting from a stepladder is working at height exactly as a contractor would be.
7. Manual handling rules apply to the lift. The same guidance cites the Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992. Charity shops, archives, events and food banks are manual handling environments, and the volunteer population frequently includes older people and people doing unfamiliar physical tasks once a week.
8. Substances and the usual hazard regimes follow the task. Cleaning products in a charity shop, chemicals in a school science club, fuels for a minibus or generator at an event. The regime attaches to the hazard, not to the employment status of the person exposed to it.
What you have to give them
Need Expert H&S Guidance?
Our qualified consultants can help you implement the right health & safety measures for your business.
9. Information, instruction and training. The HSE states that volunteers must be provided with the right information, instruction and training to work safely, and recommends a full induction covering the hazards they may face. Note the difference from staff: the statutory training duty for employees does not apply, so the obligation arrives through section 3 and through the equipment regulations instead. The practical output is the same, and the common failure is an induction designed for new starters that volunteers never attend because they are not new starters.
10. Suitable equipment and PPE, maintained, with defect reporting. Again from the HSE's guidance: provide suitable equipment and PPE, train volunteers to use it, maintain it, and have volunteers report defects promptly. A charity that asks volunteers to bring their own gloves has not discharged this.
11. A two-way route for concerns. The HSE describes a two-way process in which volunteers can raise concerns and influence health and safety decisions. There is no statutory consultation machinery for volunteers equivalent to the employee regime, which makes the arrangement a design question rather than a compliance one. In most organisations it does not exist.
The two nobody checks
12. Your compulsory insurance does not cover them. Section 1 of the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969 requires every employer carrying on business in Great Britain to insure against liability for bodily injury or disease sustained by its employees arising out of their employment. It says nothing about anyone else.
So the policy you are legally required to hold is the policy that will not respond to a volunteer's injury. Public liability cover is where that claim goes, and whether your policy actually names volunteers is a question for your broker rather than an assumption. Organisations that have grown a volunteer programme since the policy was written are the ones most likely to find a gap.
13. The reporting trigger is different, and people get it backwards. Under RIDDOR a volunteer is generally a person not at work, and regulation 5 requires a report where such a person is injured and taken from the site of the accident to hospital for treatment of that injury, or suffers a specified injury on hospital premises.
Compare that with the employee trigger, which includes incapacity for more than seven days. A volunteer taken to hospital with a cut hand is reportable. A volunteer who is sore for a fortnight and never attends hospital may well not be. Most organisations apply the employee test to volunteers and get both answers wrong. Our note on RIDDOR reportable injuries sets out the categories and clocks.
The thirteen, grouped
| Group | Duties | What usually goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Instead of s.2 | s.3, s.4 premises, risk assessment, occupiers' liability | Assumed not covered because they are not employees |
| The activity | Equipment regulations, work at height, manual handling, substances | Equipment handed over with no inspection regime |
| What you provide | Information and training, equipment and PPE, a concerns route | Induction built for staff that volunteers never attend |
| Nobody checks | Employers' liability does not cover them, different RIDDOR trigger | A policy gap and a misapplied reporting test |
Row four is where the real exposure sits, because both items are invisible until an incident, and both are resolved by a single conversation, one with a broker and one with whoever holds the accident book.
Trustees, and why this reaches the board
For a charity there is a governance layer on top. Trustees carry duties to act in the charity's best interests and to manage its resources responsibly, which the Charity Commission's guidance on what being a trustee involves sets out, and which includes managing risk.
In practice this means a trustee board cannot treat volunteer safety as an operational matter delegated out of sight. It is the same structural point that applies to a school trust board or a university council: the duty can be managed by somebody else and cannot be transferred to them. Holding the assessments, the inductions, the equipment inspection records and the insurance position in one place rather than four is a modest but genuine case for health and safety consultants and software working together, because a volunteer population turns over faster than any staff list.
Periodic health and safety audits should test two things specifically: whether volunteers appear by name in any risk assessment, and whether anyone has read the insurance schedule. Our note on individual risk assessments covers the first, and our note on lone working policies covers the volunteer who opens up alone on a Sunday.
How this looks in an international organisation
Groups with volunteer programmes in more than one country find this is one of the least harmonised areas they touch, and the reason is structural rather than cultural.
Most national occupational safety systems are built on the employment relationship. They define duties by reference to an employer and a worker, set thresholds by headcount of employees, and attach insurance to payroll. A volunteer sits outside all three hooks, so each country has had to decide separately whether to extend protection, and the answers differ widely. Some extend the full worker regime to volunteers. Some rely on general duties as the UK does. Some leave the question to civil liability and insurance alone. And in several, the headcount thresholds that trigger committees, appointments or occupational health provision count employees only, so a site running on volunteers can be below every threshold while carrying real risk.
The practical consequence for a group is that volunteer numbers never appear in the compliance picture, because every register is built from the payroll. The workable fix is to hold a volunteer count per site alongside the employee count, and to ask, per country, which duties attach to the first number rather than the second. That is a short exercise and almost nobody has done it.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite has spent 15+ years with organisations whose risk sits with people the payroll does not list, which is the position of any charity, trust or institution running a volunteer programme. We support 1,500+ businesses in 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention.
Our health and safety consultants work extensively with education, insurance, legal and office-based clients, and in education the volunteer question arrives with parent helpers, governors and student ambassadors, which our note on the duties education settings miss covers. Where volunteers work alongside contracted staff, our note on contractors in your office covers the other population in the building.
For international organisations, our global health and safety consultants establish which duties attach to volunteers in each country rather than assuming the British answer, and our international health and safety consultants can tell you which sites sit below a local threshold only because volunteers are not counted.
Do two things this week. Search your risk assessments for the word volunteer, and read what your liability policy actually says about them. Then book a free gap analysis and we will tell you in one call which of the thirteen you can evidence.
Related Articles
Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
