About This Sector
Retail businesses face health and safety risks that affect both employees and customers. Slips, trips, and falls are the most common cause of injury in retail, followed by manual handling injuries from stock movement. Multi-site retailers have the additional challenge of maintaining consistent compliance across every location. Arinite provides Chartered health and safety consultants who deliver standardised compliance frameworks across retail portfolios of any size.
Sector-Specific Regulations
The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 places a duty on retailers to protect both employees and members of the public affected by their activities. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 set standards for floors, traffic routes, and welfare facilities. The Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992 apply to stock handling, deliveries, and shelf stacking. The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires fire risk assessments for all retail premises. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require risk assessments covering all activities including customer-facing operations.
Common Compliance Failures We Find
These are the health and safety failures Arinite's consultants find most frequently in this sector:
Slip and trip risk assessments that do not account for wet weather, spillages, or high-traffic customer areas.
Manual handling assessments missing for stock room operations, deliveries, and shop floor replenishment.
Fire risk assessments that do not account for customer evacuation, high stock density, or seasonal changes in layout.
No documented procedures for managing customer incidents, near misses, or aggressive behaviour.
Inconsistent compliance across multiple sites, with each store maintaining its own (or no) documentation.
No health and safety training records for part-time or seasonal staff.
Our Services for This Sector
Arinite's retail health and safety services include comprehensive risk assessments covering customer-facing and back-of-house operations, fire risk assessments for retail premises including seasonal layout changes, manual handling assessments for stock handling and delivery operations, slip and trip risk assessments and control measures, health and safety audits across multi-site retail portfolios, standardised compliance documentation for consistent application across all stores, staff training for fire marshals, first aiders, and manual handling, and health and safety software for real-time compliance visibility across every retail location.
Book a Free Retail Gap Analysis Call
Book a free gap analysis call with one of our Chartered health and safety consultants. In 30 minutes, we will assess your current retail health and safety arrangements and identify the compliance gaps that matter most.
