Health and safety toolbox

Via its website

Although the HSE is usually associated with the enforcement side of health and safety, it’s often forgotten that it has a major role in providing businesses with instruction on how to comply with their legal duties.

Over the years, it has produced a great deal of guidance material on the subject. More recently, it has focused its attention on providing this information online.

What to do

The HSE has added so much online content that the website has become very large. This means it can be a bit of a challenge to find what you’re looking for. To address this, a new section has been added: The health and safety toolbox (see The next step).

So it’s not all new information?

Rather than containing brand new information, the toolbox uses guidance that’s been around for quite a while.

Note. This isn’t a bad thing, as it means the HSE hasn’t changed its mind on what constitutes best practice and the steps businesses should take to achieve compliance.

Tip 1. Much of the information is a summary of the more detailed guidance which can be found on the rest of the HSE’s website and in its publications. So it’s a good place to start if you only want a brief guide as to what you should be doing to comply with the law.

Tip 2. If you want more in-depth information, there are links to other parts of the HSE’s website; for example, working at height and manual handling.

Is it for everyone?

We believe that a complete novice would struggle to use the site. Although it isn’t filled with jargon used by experts, it does use terms that are specific to health and safety. However, someone who has a working knowledge of health and safety should be fine.

Does it do everything for you?

The introduction claims that using this site could help you to avoid expensive consultancy fees. However, this is only true if you’re willing to put the hours in to work through the whole site and to complete policy documents, risk assessments, etc. This means that using this site certainly shouldn’t be seen as a quick fix solution.

Tip 1. Using this site will help some people to manage health and safety, but it certainly won’t turn you into an expert in the subject.

Tip 2. If your business is pretty low risk, e.g. office based, then with some effort you could tick the legal boxes by using this site.

Trap. If your business activities are more dangerous; for example, your staff use potentially hazardous machinery, then you could struggle to identify appropriate control measures to reduce the associated risks.

For a link to the HSE’s website, visit http://healthandsafety.indicator.co.uk(HS 11.06.07).