Under The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 – Regulation 7, you must appoint one or more competent persons to assist you with your health and safety measures. There are three ways of appointing a health + safety advisor:

  1. Employ a health and safety manager in your business, and they can spend all of their time helping your business with your health and safety. In addition, they might not have the breadth of knowledge needed for all of your business activity. Making this an expensive option for many businesses and perhaps not warranting someone full time.
  2. Give it to someone in-house, and hope for the best. This can work, but also they will need some support. This is something Saxon Safety can offer, to help get them up to speed, and be a source of competent advice for more complex issues. Giving it to someone on top of their existing workload, and 
  3. Outsource to an expert outside agency with a team and an extensive breadth and depth of knowledge. Let them take care of it. They will still need input from you, although they can make sure you spend your time dealing with the significant risks, not filling out endless checksheets for low-risk activities. 

Whatever route you think is the right one for your business, you should make sure that the people carrying out the work have the skills, knowledge, experience and training to carry out the work properly, as well as the organizational capability.

Who Are We?

Saxon Safety is led by a Chartered Member of IOSH, who also holds Certified membership of the Association for Project Safety, Institute of fire engineers membership, and is an OSHCR registered consultant as well as being a Lifting Appointed Person. In the team, we have construction experts, fire experts, O+M experts and site inspection professionals. The whole team undertake a programme of continuous professional development. This makes sure we are always up to date with legislation and case studies. Besides our work in engineering and manufacturing, we don’t believe there is a health and safety consultancy who offer what we can across the construction sector. We advise Principal Designers,  Principal Contractors, Clients, Contractors and Designers with their CDM duties on a variety of projects. Get in touch to see how we can help you.

Important Factors

Whichever route you take, and whoever you use, please make sure of the following few points:

  • They are qualified (OSHCR registration is a good indicator of qualification level or other appropriate body)
  • Have demonstrable experience in your sector. 
  • They have the time to take on your work
  • Have the right resources to take on your work
  • Ask for examples of similar previous projects
  • Check their insurance!

We hope this helps you find the right source of competent advice for your business. We have a strong track record of supporting a range of businesses across an array of industries in different ways.  If you’re looking for a health + safety advisor, please get in touch to see how we can help you!