Good evening everyone, having just started at a manufacturing plant as HSE Advisor, my first task is to write Health and Safety Policy. As this will be the first time I have written one solo I was wondering if one of you lovely people would give it a once over for me, please be gentle haha

HSE has loads of free info eg http://www.hse.gov.uk/si...-health-safety/write.htm

Decide what you (or company) mean by 'policy'. This can describe a single page vision statement. Or it can mean to some a 250 page manual of everything in the world. My preference is to keep vision and organisation responsibilities as the 'policy statement', (2 - 4 pages) and the rest as components of the 'safety management system'. Pedantic differentiation maybe but works for me. Policy should be determined by the executive - you give them a couple of draft variants to agree, and finialise production for them, but it's their policy not yours. So you can see that short and simple is the only way for that! Use the HSE policy template as a starter, although will probably want to expand on the limited content, to determine who does what - your company 'what' will differ to HSE example. The actual 'what' is the remaining 248 pages - no, just kidding - not that many, of course, but see similar threads on this subject on this forum.

I like what Sadlass has said here. I have been looking around sampling lots and lots of H&S Policies from the www to try and identify a common standard and/or trend. However, I have failed. Everyone is doing it differently. There is such a variety in format, quantity and quality out there. My thoughts are very much that I would like to keep the policy document modular to enable it to be easily updatable if needed. The HSE website is really good and emphasises to keep the policy simple and clear. With this in mind it looks like I will be developing it in this direction; 1. Statement of Intent 2. Organisation & Responsibilities 3. The Plan As Sadlass mentioned, I will be keeping both 1 & 2 in a concise published document so everyone can see it and understand what the company is doing. The actual plan will be the heart of the policy made up of lots of annexes for each of the risks. I thought if I broke it down into annexes rather than one long document then it will be easier to manage. Whilst I appreciate that I may be just stating the obvious here I would be interested to know anyone else's approach to developing a 'manageable' policy rather than a beast that turns into a nightmare to manage.