You Just Inherited Health and Safety: Your First 30 Days
It arrived in a reorganisation, or when somebody left, or in a sentence at the end of a meeting. Health and safety is yours now. Nobody handed over anything, there was no briefing, and you already have a full job.
If that describes your week, this is the plan. It assumes you are an office manager, operations lead, practice manager or chief of staff rather than a safety professional, that you have limited time, and that you would like to know quickly whether anything is actually wrong.
The order matters. Most people in this position start by writing a new policy, which is the least useful thing you can do first.
Days 1 to 7: find out what exists
Do not fix anything this week. Find things.
Six documents tell you most of what you need to know, and their absence tells you more than their contents.
The health and safety policy: does one exist, is it signed, and is the signature someone senior and recent. HSE explains what a policy should cover.
The risk assessments: how many are there, when were they done, and is there one for each location. Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires a suitable and sufficient assessment, and one assessment covering four offices is a finding in itself.
The fire risk assessment for each premises, and when it was last reviewed. If you have moved or refitted since, it is out of date.
Training records: inductions, fire wardens, first aiders, and whether anything has a refresh date.
The incident record: is anything being logged at all. An office of two hundred with nothing recorded for three years is not a safe office, it is an unrecorded one.
Insurance certificates, and whether they are current. Employers' liability insurance is a statutory requirement under the 1969 Act and an expired certificate is the fastest avoidable failure there is.
Put all six in one folder. That folder is now the most useful thing in your organisation.
Days 8 to 14: find out who is responsible
The second week is about boundaries, and it will save you from doing other people's work.
Your building. In a leased or serviced office, the landlord or operator holds the premises fire risk assessment, the alarm testing and the plant maintenance. You hold your own arrangements, your people and anything specific to them. Ask for their documents in writing. What comes back, and how quickly, tells you how that relationship works.
Your group. If you are part of a larger organisation, establish what is decided centrally and what is local. A group policy is not a local risk assessment, and central ownership of a topic does not mean anyone has done anything about it here.
Your contractors. Cleaning, security, maintenance and facilities providers are in your building regularly and you owe duties to them. Establish who checked them and when.
Your other countries, if you have any. This is the one most likely to be genuinely unaddressed, because obligations are national and vary considerably. A country with people but no local documents is your largest exposure, not your smallest.
Days 15 to 21: work out what would fail today
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Now form a view. The useful test is not "are we compliant", which is unanswerable in three weeks. It is "what would we produce if somebody asked".
Four requests are the ones that actually come: a client questionnaire, an insurer at renewal, a regulator, or an acquirer. All four ask for broadly the same things, and you have already collected most of them.
Go through the folder and mark each item as current, out of date, or missing. Then mark which gaps are cheap and which need budget. Almost always, most of the list is cheap: a policy needs signing, an assessment needs reviewing, a certificate needs replacing. A small number of items need money or a decision from somebody more senior than you.
That split is the deliverable for week four.
Days 22 to 30: decide what you own and what you escalate
The final week is a conversation, not a document.
Establish who the competent person is. Regulation 7 requires the appointment of one or more competent persons to assist in complying with statutory duties. Competence means training, knowledge and experience, and it is entirely possible that you are not it and should not be expected to be. Being given the topic in a reorganisation does not confer competence, and saying so plainly is not a failure. It is the single most useful thing you can put in writing.
Take the split upstairs. Present what exists, what is missing, what it costs and what you need decided. Ask for three things specifically: a budget figure, a named senior owner, and agreement on whether external support is needed. A request with those three items gets an answer. A general concern does not.
Put dates on things. Whatever is agreed, put a review date in a calendar. The reason you inherited a mess is almost always that the last person did not.
What not to do first
Four common instincts, all understandable and all premature.
Do not write a new policy. You cannot describe arrangements you have not yet established, and a fresh policy over an unknown reality is a document that misrepresents you.
Do not buy software. Systems are valuable once you know what you are recording and who owns it. Bought first, they become an empty database and evidence of activity without progress.
Do not run a training programme. Training is a control measure for risks you have identified. Delivered first, it teaches people about hazards nobody has assessed.
Do not fix the visible things only. Signage, first aid boxes and fire extinguisher checks are quick and satisfying, and none of them is where the exposure sits in an office. The exposure is in assessments that do not exist, arrangements nobody owns, and people working somewhere you have not looked.
The 30-day summary
| Week | Objective | Output | |---|---|---| | 1 | Find the six documents | One folder, and a list of what is missing | | 2 | Establish boundaries | Who owns the building, the group position, contractors, other countries | | 3 | Test against real requests | Each item marked current, out of date or missing, split by cost | | 4 | Own or escalate | Competent person identified, budget and owner agreed, dates set |
Thirty days will not make you compliant and is not meant to. It will tell you where you stand, which is the thing you do not currently have and cannot make decisions without.
If your organisation operates in more than one country
One warning specifically for that situation.
Obligations are national and they differ far more than most people expect. Several jurisdictions require specific appointments, prescribed documents or training completed before someone starts work, and none of it is satisfied by a translated group policy. An entity of twelve people in another country can carry obligations your head office does not.
That is not something to resolve in your first month, and it is something to name in your week four conversation, because it usually requires locally qualified support rather than more effort from you. Keeping the position for every location in one place rather than several inboxes is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone.
Where Arinite fits
A great many of the people we work with arrived at health and safety exactly this way, and the first conversation is usually the one described above. 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, and can hold the competent person function where that is the sensible answer.
Where your organisation has people in several countries, our global health and safety consultants establish what each jurisdiction requires, and our international health and safety consultants keep it current. Where you want an independent view of what your thirty days found, health and safety audits provide it.
If you have just been handed this and would like a straight answer about where you stand, a free gap analysis is designed for precisely that conversation. HSE's introduction to managing health and safety is a reasonable place to start reading in the meantime.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
