Would your business pass a HSE inspection?

A HSE inspector can walk through your door without warning.

If they find problems, the consequences range from a formal notice requiring you to fix things urgently, to a prohibition notice shutting down an activity on the spot, to prosecution.

Most business owners assume that inspections happen to bigger companies or to businesses in obviously dangerous industries.

That’s not how it works.

What triggers an inspection

Some visits are reactive. If someone is injured at work, if a near miss is reported or if a worker makes a complaint to the HSE, an inspector may visit to see what happened and whether the business is managing the risk properly.

Some are proactive. The HSE prioritises sectors where the risks are higher, including construction, manufacturing, agriculture and food production. Businesses in those sectors should assume that they’ll be visited at some point.

Some are random. The HSE carries out planned inspection programmes across industries and any business can be selected. For example, those working with engineered stone are currently being visited.

What an inspector will ask for

When an inspector arrives, the first thing they’ll want to see is your paperwork.

Specifically:

• Risk assessments covering the hazards in your workplace

• A written health and safety policy (legally required if you have five or more employees)

• Evidence that staff have received relevant training

• Your accident book and any RIDDOR reports (the legal reporting system for serious workplace incidents)

They’ll also look at whether what’s in your documents actually reflects how your business operates day to day.

Where businesses most often fail

In our experience, the most common failure point is documentation. This might include:

• Risk assessments that are too generic to be useful

• A health and safety policy that was put together years ago and hasn’t been looked at since

• Training records that exist on paper but don’t match what staff have actually been shown

Equally common is the situation where a business has identified hazards and listed control measures, but those measures aren’t actually in place.

An inspector will walk the site. If the documentation says that operatives wear PPE but nobody is wearing any, that’s a problem regardless of what the paperwork says.

RIDDOR is another area that catches businesses out. Serious injuries, certain dangerous occurrences and occupational diseases must be reported to the HSE within strict timeframes. Many businesses either don’t know this or don’t realise that an incident they experienced qualified.

What happens if an inspector finds problems

The response depends on how serious the issues are.

For minor concerns, an inspector may give verbal or written advice and expect you to act on it. For more serious issues, they can issue an improvement notice, which sets a legal deadline for the problem to be resolved.

If there’s an immediate risk of serious injury, they can issue a prohibition notice. That activity must stop until the issue is fixed. There’s no grace period.

In the most serious cases, prosecution follows. Fines for health and safety offences can be substantial and, in cases involving death or gross negligence, individuals can face imprisonment.

How we can help

We carry out health & safety audits and inspections for businesses which highlight areas businesses need to improve on. That means going through your documentation, checking whether your controls are actually in place and identifying areas for improvement.

It’s a practical exercise, not an audit for its own sake.