Posted By Chris Harris Our company is proactive in helping charitable organisations by enabling staff to spend a (paid) day assisting them with a variety of tasks. This is often semi domestic painting, gardening, stream clearance or even dry stone walling.Currently I provide risk assessments for each activity & occassion, but have been told it is the legal duty of the voluntary organisation to carry out suitable & sufficient risk assessments for the safety of people not in their employ, which covers the tasks our volunteers perform for them. In this situation whose main duty is it to complete the risk assessment, our or theirs?

Posted By David Sinclair Having spent a very long time researching this question (much of it with the HSE) on behalf of clients I can now say with a degree of certainty that the volunteers will be regarded as being part of their employers undertaking (as the work was arranged/organised by them) and so the employer is responsible for the risk assessments. It is unlikely that the employer will (on his own) be regarded as being competent to undertake the assessments and so the agency for whom the work is being undertaken will have to be involved. However, if something goes wrong and an employee is injured, the employer and the agency for whom the work is done may both be liable. Hope this helps. Regards. David

Posted By Laurie They are your employees, being paid by you, and are therefore your responsibility surely? Laurie

Posted By Alec Wood Chris My reasoning for you providing the assessments and having them integrate them into a their systems is that many of these voluntary organisations simply do not have the expertise necessary. This is particularly true of the smaller bodies, often local and reliant purely on volunteers with no paid staff. As charitable endeavours, we would all probably feel that their money is best spent providing the services for which they exist rather than paying the salary of a H&S manager, on the proviso that they can meet their legal obligations some other way. Supporting businesses such as yours have an opportunity to allow them to continue doing this by providing the risk assessment etc services for them and ensuring their legal obligations are met. The cases of large national organisations is of course somewhat different since, because of their sheer size, the administrative burden is large and best served by salaried employees, who would normally include someone with H&S knowledge and responsibility. While the legal position is that of shared responsibility, the "corporate social responsibility" ethic that leads your company to provide the staff time to assist this charitable organisation would perhaps be best served by continuing the status quo. Alec Wood Samsung Electronics