https://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg291.pdf

Page 1, para 3

Similarly, if you allow employees to provide their own equipment then it will also be covered by PUWER and you will need to make sure it complies.

Of course there are all the other things you need to consider noise, vibration etc as employees may not pick the best options.

Chris

Looks like I'll need to go back with my tail between my legs :( 

I wonder if insurance has anything to say about these things

Thanks for the response chaps

We permit it, but it does rather depend on what the 'work equipment' is - in our case it's calculators, pens, pencils, maybe digital camera. For that kind of stuff it's difficult to see either why or how you'd prohibit it.  It would be a bit different if the work equipment was hundereds of tonnes of machinery.

For some things there needs to be standards - probably not for pencils, but anything that has a PPE function (for example) will need to meet standards. We allow people to wear their own boots provided they meet the  documented standards.  (Before anyone starts I would like to highlight that "allow" does not mean "require" and all staff are offered free-issue safety boots if their role requires them.) 

Any actual hazardous machinery, you'd need to make sure it was up to standard.  I think PUWER requires that if equipment is used for the employer's business then the employer needs to ensure it's suitable and safe, regardless of who owns it.  However, I can';t think of anything that requires teh employer to own all the equipment used for tehir business (and there are obvious cases where that's not teh norm - as I allude to above, engineers' calculators, but also chefs' knives, and I'm sure there are more).

We do let people provide their own furniture (we have a few members of staff who have brought their own chairs to the office) but again it needs to be of at least an equivalent standard to the company equipment.

There are a few things we do not permit - for example, connection to the company internal netwroks, either  directly or via VPN, is only permitted from company-supplied hardware, so you can't use your own computer.

We do allow people to use their own mobile phone, but they need to grant the company IT department full rights on it, so the choice is use the compnay one, or let  the company IT department have free reign in your personal one.  Vanishingly few people take up the offer to grant full access rights to their personal phone to our IT department, for some reason.

Agree with Kate. From my time as an inspector If you look at some of the top end (by price) cars its more common for the technitions to have their own set of tools than for the employer to provide them. However no matter who provides teh tools thge employer is still resposible for them under PUWER - mad i know but then who said the law was alawys easy.