Posted By Graham Fox. Our company had recently taken over a smaller company in the same line of business.Their office building is in the south of England and our main office is in the north. There are eight employees in the new company, six of which are I.T. specialists and normally work from home, only occassionally calling into the office building,leaving just two employees full time working in the office. My question is as all employees are now working for the same company albeit at different sites, does the five or more rule apply in the new office building for Risk Assessments etc, even though there are only two employees there for most of the time, or does the HSE look at it as a total of employees with the two sites added together eg 25 plus people ? Your comments will be welcomed.

Posted By P Williams John is right, it is the number of people employed by the company not the number at a particular site. The logic behind it is that for up to 5 employees it is deemed reasonable to pass on safety info etc verbally whereas after 5 this becomes more likely not to happen due to the practicalities of it, chinese wispers i guess. Interestingly though, regarding safety policies there is only a need to record a safety policy where an undertaking employs 5 people or more "for the time being" Effectively this means there has to be 5 or more people physically at work at any one time. Therefore an employer who employs for example 20 people each of them part time and only 4 are at work at any one time would not need to record a safety policy. He would however have to record risk assessments since the management regs do do include the phrase "for the time being" eg someone with 5 shops each with 1 member of staff would require a written safety policy statement whereas someone with 4 shops each employing 2 part time staff (8 in total) where only 1 works at a time would not require a written policy. Confused???