Hi All

I’m fairly new to safety with 1 year under my belt, I hold an advisor role for a manufacturing company.

In the company I work for, it is the production managers (all IOSH managing safety trained) responsibility to write the risk assessments, SWP's, CoSHH etc for their own departments. These are then sent to the H&S department for approval and most of the time tweaking.

The reason for this is that we are a large manufacturing site with warehousing and logistics, with many specialist skills and processors. So we encourage the managers as the experts in their own field to take ownership and responsibility to write these documents. The H&S dept then reviews, views the process and adds their view to the record before it is finally issued to our system.

My question is.... is this the norm? Other job I have seen seem to suggest that the H&S Dept are soley responsible for the RA's and SWP's- leaving little responsibility to production / managers of the staff ??

I always try to get involved with all the processors with the managers, but how does this work in other organisations?

I look forward to your input

Thanks, Adam

Hi Adam
I am the health and safety manager for a large manufacturing company. There was a time when it was my sole responsibility to compile all the risk assessments, safety procedures etc. and also review and update all the H&S management systems. It soon became apparent to me that this workload was to much for one person. I have set up and now run and monitor the system by the use of small teams that have other responsibilities within the company. Such as a risk assessment team, a H&S auditing team etc. There is nothing wrong in doing this as long as you use trained and component staff, this may mean mentoring or arranging relevant courses for them. I would love to have a full time H&S department but in some companies this is not possible because of various reasons.
I think that the key word here is competent staff, as health and safety manager within my company I feel that this is part of my responsibility to made sure that anyone doing any H&S work is indeed competent and fully trained to fulfill the H&S role delegated to them.

Hope this helps

Steve W

As people have said this is an ideal system. H&S policies and procedures should be embedded at the local level and it is common practice in all but the smallest employers for the local operational staff to be responsible for writing RA’s, SOPs etc. After all are you an expert in everything that happens on your site(s)? Could you tell any operator what they should be doing to ensure their H&S? In my organisation I certainly couldn’t. My job is more strategic and advisory. Key things are auditing and investigating incidents. Basically this consists of asking the daft questions that the local staff might have forgotten to ask but I leave the clever stuff to them.

Adam, I agree with others here, your system is good; competent supervisors taking ownership of risk assessments is ideal. As a consultant I try and create a similar system at customers.

As damelcfc says, there should be a review system, in the event of process changes, incidents etc, and annually (or every 9 months which I encourage, or more frequent if there are still highish risks) and as a consultant my aim is to ensure the reviews are done.

I participate in the reviews with input on regulations and best practices, PPE choices, incident investigations, training suggestions etc and, as damelcfc indicated, ensure other appropriate assessments are documented like COSHH, LOLER and proper Work at Height assessments.

Keep it up!

JohnW

You have the perfect scenario, at my alst employer supervisors and team leaders completed them and managers approved them which was excellent. New company not the same at the moment with my small H&S team doing everything for them.

However, I have rewritten the policy and arrangements and the new role will be managers or team leaders to do this and then have an approval system by either a member of my team and I or indeed a line manager.

Ownership is the key to safety and the H&S team support, educate and guide. I see my new vision taking 3 years to fully embed into the business so don't knock what you have.

As the kids would say these days: 'result!'