Health and Safety Policy:
Bespoke Writing, Review, and Maintenance

A health and safety policy is a written document that sets out how your organisation manages health and safety. It is a legal requirement under Section 2(3) of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 for every employer with five or more employees.

The policy has three parts.

A policy that only contains a statement of intent is not compliant. All three parts are required.

If you employ five or more people, you must have a written health and safety policy. This is a legal requirement under Section 2(3) of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.

If you employ fewer than five people, you still have a legal duty to manage health and safety, but you are not required to write it down. In practice, most employers benefit from having a written policy regardless of size, because it demonstrates to clients, inspectors, and insurers that you take your obligations seriously.

The policy must be brought to the attention of all employees. It is not enough to have it filed in a drawer. It must be communicated, accessible, and reviewed regularly.

There is no prescribed format. The law requires the policy to be written, to cover all three parts (statement, organisation, arrangements), and to be kept up to date. How you structure it is your choice.

Arinite's Chartered consultants write all of this for you. Every section is tailored to your specific business activities, premises, and risk profile.

Most businesses that search for a health and safety policy template are trying to create or update their policy without professional help. A template provides a structure, but it cannot tell you whether what you write in it is adequate for your specific business, legally compliant, or aligned with current legislation.

Arinite's Chartered consultants use a structured policy framework as the basis for a focused 30-minute compliance call. On the call, the consultant will review your current policy (if you have one) against the three-part structure required by law, identify which sections are missing, inadequate, or out of date, highlight the specific areas that would not satisfy an inspector, and confirm whether your policy needs a complete rewrite or targeted updates.

You leave the call knowing exactly what your policy needs. No guesswork. No generic templates. No false sense of compliance.

If we cannot identify at least one gap, we send you a £50 gift card. In 15+ years, we have never paid out.

There is no fixed statutory review period for a health and safety policy. However, the policy must be reviewed and updated whenever there is a significant change to your business: new premises, new activities, changes in staffing structure, new legislation, or following an incident.

As good practice, Arinite recommends an annual review at minimum. For businesses on our outsourced health and safety service, the annual policy review is included in the package and scheduled automatically through our compliance platform.

A policy that was written five years ago and never updated is a common finding in HSE inspections. It demonstrates that health and safety governance is not active. Inspectors look for evidence that the policy is a living document, not a historical artefact.

Arinite's Chartered consultants write your entire health and safety policy from scratch or rewrite an existing policy to bring it up to standard. The service includes a consultation to understand your business activities, premises, staffing structure, and specific risks, a bespoke policy covering all three parts (statement of intent, organisation, arrangements), tailored arrangements sections for every hazard type relevant to your workplace, annual review and update as part of any ongoing engagement, upload to Arinite's health and safety software so the policy is digitally accessible, version-controlled, and ready for inspector review, and communication guidance to ensure the policy is brought to the attention of all employees.

The policy integrates with the rest of your health and safety management system. It references your risk assessments, training programme, audit schedule, and emergency procedures, because these are the arrangements it describes. A standalone policy that exists in isolation from the management system it governs is not defensible.

Arinite writes health and safety policies for businesses across the UK and in 50+ countries. For UK businesses, policies are written against the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. For international businesses, locally qualified consultants create policies compliant with local legislation in the relevant language.

Whether you need a single policy for a UK office or a suite of policies covering 20 countries, Arinite delivers the same standard: bespoke, legally compliant, and maintained.