Is Health and Safety Support Worth It for a Business Our Size?
The Five Stages of a Fire Risk Assessment
A typical visit takes 1–3 hours depending on the size of the building
We get asked this a lot, usually in a slightly apologetic tone, as though the question is a bit silly. It is not. It is the right question, and the honest answer is: it depends on what has changed.
Most of the businesses we work with have between 5 and 250 staff — construction, manufacturing, warehousing, facilities and professional services. They need proper health and safety support but do not need, and often cannot yet justify, a full-time EHS manager. That gap is real, and it is where most of the problems live.
The four situations that usually prompt the call
Almost every enquiry we get traces back to one of four things.
1. Growth has outpaced the informal approach
The we have always done it this way approach works perfectly well at eight people, where everyone can see everyone else and the owner knows every job personally. At thirty it starts to strain. At sixty it has usually broken, quietly, without anyone noticing the moment it happened.
2. A client or insurer has started asking for evidence
This is the most common trigger by some distance. A tender asks for your health and safety policy. An insurer asks for risk assessments at renewal. A main contractor asks for method statements. Suddenly the question is not whether you manage safety well — it is whether you can prove it, on paper, this week.
3. An incident, near miss or HSE visit has been a wake-up call
Nobody enjoys this route in. It is also the one where the value of getting it right is most obvious to everybody involved.
4. The person who used to do health and safety has left
This is the quiet one. In a lot of smaller businesses, health and safety sits with somebody who took it on informally. When they leave, the knowledge leaves with them. Nobody picks it up because nobody is quite sure what it involved. Six months later the assessments are out of date and no one has noticed.
What proportionate actually means
The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 applies to every employer, regardless of size. What changes with size is not whether the duty exists but what a reasonable response to it looks like.
If you have fewer than five employees you are not required to write your health and safety policy down. You are still required to have one, and to manage risk. Above five, it needs to be written.
Proportionate means the effort matches the risk. A twelve-person accountancy practice and a twelve-person roofing contractor have the same legal duty and very different obligations in practice. Anyone who tells you otherwise, or who sends you the same template regardless, is not paying attention.
What support looks like in practice
There is no single model, and it should not be sold as one. In practice it tends to be one of:
- A one-off audit, to find out where you actually stand rather than where you assume you stand
- A policy and documentation rebuild, usually when the existing paperwork was inherited, downloaded or written for a different business
- Ongoing retained support, where you want someone who knows your operation and can pick up the phone
- Occasional advice — someone to call when you are planning something and are not sure whether it is compliant
The last one is underrated. A ten-minute conversation before you commit to a method of work is worth considerably more than a report after the fact.
What it should not involve
No scare tactics. Health and safety consultancy has a reputation problem, and it is largely earned by people who sell on fear.
No jargon for its own sake. If a document cannot be understood by the person who has to follow it, it is not a control measure — it is a filing exercise.
And no fifty-page reports nobody will read. A report is valuable only if it changes something. Length is not a proxy for rigour, and a document that sits unopened in a drawer has achieved nothing except to record that you were told.
So is it worth it for a business your size?
If none of the four triggers above apply, and your risk assessments are current, and you could produce them tomorrow if asked, then possibly not right now.
If one of them does apply, the honest answer is that the cost of sorting it deliberately is almost always lower than the cost of sorting it under pressure — during a tender, after an incident, or with an inspector already on site.
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