Does Health and Safety Law Apply to Churches? Yes, Including Your Volunteers
The Five Stages of a Fire Risk Assessment
A typical visit takes 1–3 hours depending on the size of the building
Many churches believe health and safety law does not really apply to them. It does. The belief is understandable — a church is not a factory. There is no production line, no heavy plant, and most of the people on site on any given day are not employees at all. It feels like a different category of place. Legally, it is not.
Why churches are busier premises than they look
A parish church on a Wednesday afternoon can be almost empty. That is the image most people hold. But across a normal week the same building might host Sunday services, a toddler group, a foodbank, a choir practice, an evening letting to an outside organisation, and a contractor working on the roof.
That is members of the public, volunteers, hirers and contractors — often in an old building, sometimes listed, frequently with limited means of escape and no straightforward way to alter the fabric. Busy, varied, mixed occupancy, difficult building. That is a higher risk profile than most offices.
What the law says
The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 applies to any organisation with employees. Most churches have at least one — a minister, an administrator, a caretaker — which brings the whole Act into play. Two points people get wrong:
It does not matter that your volunteers are unpaid. Section 3 of the Act creates a duty towards people who are not your employees but who may be affected by your activities. That covers volunteers, congregation, visitors and hirers.
It does not matter that you are only open on Sundays. The duty attaches to the premises and the activity, not to how often the doors are unlocked. If people are on your premises, you are responsible for their safety while they are there.
The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 then require you to assess the risks. If you have five or more employees, that assessment must be written down.
The five risks we see most in places of worship
Working at height
Maintenance, decorating, changing bulbs, putting up decorations, clearing gutters. Overwhelmingly the biggest cause of serious injury in church buildings, and almost always done by volunteers using whatever ladder is to hand.
Slips and trips
Uneven floors, worn stone, unexpected steps, wet entrances in bad weather, and trailing cables from portable heaters or PA equipment.
Fire safety in older buildings
Limited escape routes, combustible historic fabric, candles, and layouts that cannot easily be changed. This has its own legal regime and its own requirements — we have covered church fire risk assessments in detail separately.
Asbestos in pre-2000 buildings
Commonly overlooked, because people associate asbestos with industrial premises. Church halls, boiler rooms and vestry extensions built or refurbished before 2000 are all candidates.
Manual handling
Moving furniture and equipment for events, often at speed, often by people who are not used to it and have not been briefed.
Contractors: where the risk concentrates
In January 2025, a construction company was fined 60,000 pounds at Birmingham Magistrates Court after one of its steeplejacks fell to his death from a 60-metre church steeple in Kings Norton. He had been working from a bosun chair with no suitable backup system in place. The company pleaded guilty to breaching the Work at Height Regulations 2005.
It is important to be clear about who was prosecuted: the contractor, not the church.
But it illustrates something that matters for church leadership. Specialist work on church buildings — steeples, roofs, towers, stonework — is inherently high risk, and the church is the one appointing the contractor. Under CDM 2015, if you commission construction work you are a client, with duties to make reasonable enquiries about a contractor competence and arrangements. Asking a steeplejack how they intend to prevent a fall is not interfering. It is the duty.
What this protects
A proper risk assessment does not only protect your congregation and volunteers, though that is the point of it. It also protects your leadership team. PCC members, trustees and church officers can carry personal exposure where there has been a clear failure to manage obvious risk. Most people in those roles have taken them on out of goodwill and have never been told what they are responsible for.
It is more straightforward than most people expect
Many churches we visit have never had a formal assessment done, and expect the process to be onerous. It generally is not. For a typical parish church it is a walk round, a conversation about how the building is actually used across the week, and a written record with practical actions in priority order.
The hard part is not the assessment. It is the reviewing — and that is where most organisations quietly fall down.
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