Having spent a few years visiting various workplaces to look over their H&S, I would say there are many that have no idea. In my experience those with a higher risk (engineering, construction) are more aware - not perfect - but they realise that H&S is part-and-parcel of their duties. Others, like nurseries and playgroups, were usually a fair bet to have everything in place ( I imagine as they get inspected a lot, Ofsted, etc).

However, often the worst ones I found, were those considered to be low risk sectors, like the company you mentioned often were suprised to find that they had duties under HASWA. THe amount of times I went into retails stores (sometimes part of large chains) and asked the manager if they had a H&S policy and theier eyes would light up and they would lead me to the Health & Safety Law poster (oftens without the numes and numbers of the responsible peersons filled in).

That said, I am surprised that an owner of an IT business didn't question the need to put his staff through FLT training...

I agree and indeed I have seen at first hand how consultants often provide a load of generic tosh which is not relevant to the business. On the other side of the coin, many SMEs will only look at the bottom line when it comes to h&s support, which means it is difficult to provide good bespoke documentation for the price.

When I started with current employer I was its first health and safety professional in a company employing 900.

We had just paid a well known consultancy thousands of pounds to do our health and safety policy.

On my first day in the job I sat down with the architect of my role and said that we could not adopt a 300 page policy.

Essentially the consultancy had interviewed some of our staff and had ascertained all the risks that they might come across. Then hit a few buttons on the word processor and out spewed generic text on e.g. the guarding of woodworking machinery. Our main workload was as a design consultancy, though our contract administrator might find a circular saw on a civil engineering site.

In my consultancy days, I have sometimes encountered material supplied by another consultancy, which consisted of nice looking binders containing lots of useful information on key subjects and legislation. Ok in so far as that goes. However, this was presented as the health and safety management system of the organisation, which it clearly wasn't. Far better to provide a bespoke management system that is relevant to the organisation, but then that takes a fair amount of work, which many organisations are not willing to pay for, so they end up with a generic collection of legalese.

I have to say that the HSE didn't help a few years ago when they issued one of their guides on stating your business. This consisted of taking their document, filling in the blanks, and hey presto you have a health and safety policy. Not helpful in getting organisations to address their actual work and control systems.

Edited by user 17 January 2017 14:43:46(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I am not looking to defend bad/lazy consultants, but I have come across something similar from company H&S bods. It is common for a H&S Advisor to bring along with them what ever they had at their last employer, telling everyone how great it is, and then try to implement this into their new employer who is totally different. This often leads to safety management systems which bare no relevance to the new employers business, resources, risks or aims and is seen by those at the sharp end as 'over the top' or impractical. These H&S Advisors are no more creating a 'bespoke' system than the consultants being rightly panned in this thread. I was at the inaugural meeting of the Staffordshire branch at which Judith Hackett was the guest speaker and listened as she described all consultants as 'snake oil' peddlers, which went down well with the consultants in the room??? but I have met many in our profession who are not consultants who could certainly be describe in Judith's unflattering way :)    

You would have to question the client as well, for not asking why documents had not been updated for 3yrs.

I am sympathetic to both sides of the generic document issue - you only have to look on this dicussion forum for people asking for copies of other people assessments/policies - how is this much different from a so called consultant providing gerneric documents?

Good point Ian and I agree.  The clients in question thought they were covered as this particular company told them (unsurprisingly) they were legally compliant.

Yes, they should have checked etc. etc. but I can understand when trying to run a business H&S is not always top priority, if you have someone telling you don’t worry it’s all covered.

I find with a lot of small companies know they should have things in place but have no idea how to do it. 

and therein lies the adage "ignorance is no defence under law" but after Dickens I will repeat "the law is an ass"

Good Consultants will stand by and defend their work - the rest take the clients money and when the preverbial is heading towards the fan head off for the sunset

It really was a missed opportunity by Lofsted and others to weed out the trash - if you want to insult be prepared to take on the full legal responsibilty of those you are fleecing, sorry charging for professional consultancy services

Interesting topic, Being a consultant is becoming a very very difficult task indeed. As someone has mentioned and sadly it's true Health and Safety is still seen as a burden and just another tick in the box for companies ( larger organsations not so much) and this will not ever change in my opinion. The fact is most companies will always use the cheapest because as said they just want that tick. sad for consultants who really value their work but it's true.

Policy / training presentations / procedures will always be shared and to be fair I see nothing wrong using a template that works as long as the information is specific.