Geoff Personally, I don't think there is any need to go down this road. I expect some others will come back with doom and gloom stuff. When I helped out with h&s advice for my golf club some years ago I did not put my name to anything and made it clear the advice I was giving was free and purely as a club member - job done.

I'm not sure if you can "opt" out of responsibility for advice given? Look at the situation - you are being asked to help out on the grounds that you know about health and safety so considered to be an "expert". You give advice so there must be some legal stand point. What if you were a plumber and a friend asked you to install an outside tap. Easy peasy you may think but during the installation he breaks the main stop valve and floods the house. Who is responsible?

Regardless on the good will intention your are acting as a consultant and providing health and safety advise on this principal. Therefore liability rests with you!

I think it will come down to what you are happy doing at the ned of the day. i would say that you are advising on health and safety matters so are working as a consultant even if you are not getting paid for the work in my view makes little difference. You could look at asking the committee to pay the cost of the PI or pay it yourself which then means you could look at carrying out more private work. Or you might be happy to advise the committee and the chance is you will do a very good job on what is a very low risk premises and it's unlikely the LA or HSE will ever get involved in the premises but the village hall has it's paperwork in order. What happens if the village hall burns down and you haven't carried out a fire risk assessment and the insurance refuses to pay out as their where clear violations of the RRFSO they may well blame you. (ok this may well be very unlikely but you never know) Also you are doing a fellow H&S bod out of work by doing the work for free, what happens if your company found someone who was willing to work for free so sacked you. Pi insurance would be around £20 a month. Phil

The world really has gone mad.... :( Ray was spot on with his initial comment about doom and gloom. Nuff said, roll on Friday

teh-boy and others, thanks for your comments. For those in the doom and gloom brigade, the giving of advice freely is no different than doing so on this forum or down the road in the pub. Furthermore, is it not better to help out those who need advice, rather than see them make mistakes which could be costly and possibly painfull? Sometimes I do despair with this industry... Ray

As a first aider trained originally some years back I remember that we were not permitted to administer pain relief, i.e. Anadin etc. I also remember being told by our OH nurse at the time that if someone at work wanted such a product then it could only be offered "as a friend" and not in any official capacity. Thus, I would argue, safety advice could be dispensed in a similar capacity with the receiver taking responsibility for either accepting or ignoring the advice given. Providing 1st aid treatment to an injured member of the public "in need" is surely along the same lines here... "Yes, your honour, we WERE in the beer-garden when the advice was given..."

i don't see how doom a gloom comes into it. i think you need to distinguish between giving advice and been asked to write or take responsibility for actually producing documentation or instruction that will be followed. I work in fire safety i have no problem in giving advice for free to anyone business or non-business, as you say just like here on the forum. But if you start producing documentation or take on the responsibility solely for the H&S for the village hall then to my mind that puts it into a different ball park to answering the odd question or pointing them in the right direction. same as the police might do for installing a burglar alarm But the police wouldn't actually install it hopefully a professional alarm company would install it to some standard so if it then failed to activate i would take issue with the company providing that service. As said above i have no issue with you going out and providing all the H&S advice / documents for the village hall so long as you are happy to do so. No doubt there would never be an issue as it would all be low risk. I recently provided a fire risk assessment for the scout group and charged them a minimal amount and provided there fire safety training as part of that. In my view by charging them a figure it was clear that it was a business transaction through my company and that way they would be covered by my insurance should anything go wrong as opposed to providing it for free and the insurance company could argue that it wasn't a business transaction if i carried it out for free. I might be over the top in my thinking but i don't trust insurance companies if they can find away not to pay out then they will. phil