I work for a large multi site charity. I've been asked if there are any H&S reasons why volunteers in certain properties cannot be given sole day-to-day H&S management responsibilites. Putting the moral aspect to the side for a moment, am I being stupid? I can't see how theoretically (with sufficient training/instruction/  overseeing support and some sort of written agreement between the relevant parties etc) this cant happen. Views welcome.

There is no reason or limit to the H&S responsibilities that a volunteer can undertake, provided the organisations H&S Policy and procedure is suitable and sufficient.  Also the volunteer needs to be willing to accept the responsibilites.

I worked as a volunteer on a Canal restoration project (only 3 paid employees) and all the team leaders were responsible for H&S on their specific sites and projects.  All accepted the responsibilities and were trained in their roles and had responsibility for writing risk assessments and method statements and enforcing them with the volunteer members of their teams.  CDM and Construction H&S files werte created by the team leaders along with their project plan.  They were also responsible for ensuring PPE was provided and worn when required.

Did it work yes and we were able to completely restore a lock on time within within just over 12 months.  The organisation are drawing up volunteer contracts which seems to be the norm with volunteer organisations that provide paid for training.

I work for a very large, high profile charity with a wide portfolio of activities. Many of our public services are wholly volunteer run. We rely on the competency of our volunteers to deliver services safely, and on the day the supervision and management of H&S is down to our volunteers. We also have paid H&S professionals, but as a team we are actively exploring ways we could use volunteers to help us spread ourselves around a bit. It's hard to get round all of our 600+ (or more, we're not quite sure) workplaces.

At my last place we used volunteers in an advisory role, they were H&S professionals who were between jobs or looking for experience. We found that this didn't wholly relieve the paid staff from the work the volunteers did, as there was a need for quite a bit of supervision. It did help though, and while we had the volunteers we did cover more ground than we had been able to previously.

It is, as has been said here already, a question of recruiting the right volunteer, giving them the right support, and making sure you have the right kind of volunteer agreement,

John

Hi, thanks all for your considered responses, and I'm happy to take any more thoughts too. I'm out of the office most of next week, but will digest all of the opinions and come up with a composite response which I'll happily share.  

The proposal was to have volunteers carry out not only H&S ‘maintenance’ activities – routine checks etc but to also assume responsibility for day to day H&S management/supervision. The idea, with no contribution from me, has been shelved. I’m glad that for the time being at least it has not progressed since aside from the H&S issues, I’m not comfortable with the potential replacement of paid staff with volunteers.  I didn’t get as far as checking with our insurers, by the way, and I did wonder if there was any case law.