Evening all, (been a while)

In workplace volunteering activities, big on the social contribution agenda for most organisations now, how are some of you adressing the Employer's duty of care with it being paid staff time? (Your staff in non-undertaking environments)

To help narrow this down: Personally I'd expect as a minimum

- Insurance checks of host employer / charity

- Policy relevant to activities and charity (this is maybe sacrificial pending the final point)

- Suitable & Sufficient risk assessment which includes volunteers

I'd also enter a line item into a high level (intenral) risk assessment that outlined volunteering days siptulating some / the above as control measures, or procedure. 

This is broad strokes that may apply to litter picking and food banks, care homes, but nothing inherently higher risk such as heavy plant, equipment and machinery or construction etc. So I'm trying to avoiud philosophical questions and hoping other practitioners' experiences can be shared here

Thanks for reading this far

Edited by user 06 June 2023 17:44:48(UTC)  | Reason: Clarity

Hi ADALE

A couple of issues to throw into the mix.

I guess that many organisations expect that much of the volunteering by their staff is to be done in their own time and hence would not be "at work" within the meaning of Section 52 of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974.

Thence no statutory duty of care on their employer except, perhaps, for any element that is organised by the employer, e.g. the hire of a minibus to get the staff to their place of voluntary non "work" also as defined in Section 52.

Also you provide three examples of such activity. In two of these, the food bank and the care home, there will usually be "work" being done, even if it might only be a single employee at the host undertaking, perhaps one person employed in the church that operates the food bank.

In contrast the litter pick might often be for some informal or semi-formal group that may not exhibit any "work" whatsoever.

As example I have helped with the improvement of a Victorian Lane on to which a number of streets back for "ALIS" where the I stands for Improvement. No prizes for guessing what the L stands for!!

So ALIS typically organises a couple of lane clean ups a year usually on a Saturday and/or Sunday. 

No employees but ALIS does have a constitution and would have duties under Section 4 of HSWA and perhaps occasionally under CDM as a "non-domestic" client though in the latter case the duties would largely divert to somebody else with at least one person"at work" to do work in connection with the lane improvement.

In the early days, 100 years of accumulated debris meant that in places the mud had built up to about 600mm depth alongside the rubble stone walls and one February the local Council offered us plant and operator to shovel the mud into piles. We then loaded this onto flat bed trucks driven by Council staff and taken off to the weighbridge. So, Council staff "at work" though with no payment by ALIS.

So, at least on the paper that HSWA is printed on, a duty of care on ALIS towards those Council staff under Section 4, but whilst we explained to the Council what we wanted to achieve and how, at no stage did we provide some formal risk assessment nor was it asked for.

Similarly on a couple of occasions we have hired a self-employed casual labourer to do some of the hard graft of hoeing between cobble stones and brushing up earth and weeds. Low risk and the risks obvious so we have not provided any risk assessment documentation.

I think this is a matter of degree of risk. Were we to bring in a contractor to do work that might impact the structural stability of the rubble walls, then we would need to make sure that somebody (i.e competent engineer or surveyor) did the appropriate assessment, almost certainly in writing.

Edited by user 07 June 2023 16:36:14(UTC)  | Reason: Typo and formatting

I think we need to be careful about our terminology here. Volunteering will mean different things to different people. A company might say “ on your time off we will support you volunteering to work with a charity of your choice. We might even pay some of your costs but organising it is down to you and your colleagues” in that case it could be regarded as “pure” volunteering , in which case the company does not really have any duty of care. On the other hand a company might arrange for its staff to take part in some “volunteering” which takes place in worktime, which they have arranged and people are expected attend.  That is definitely something that the company needs to manage .

Most of the activities I have been involved with, in the past tend to be a bit in the middle: Done in work time and arranged by the company but zero pressure from the business to take part ie actually volunteering. I think that the company still had a duty of care because they chose the activities and they at least had to identify organisations that could safely accommodate volunteers. So we did things like spending a day helping out in an animal shelter or a bit of light gardening  on a National Trust property. The organisations had done this before and had all of the necessary risk assessment in place. The National Trust did not expect anyone to use a chainsaw or do any tree climbing.  So, like a  lot of things in life it has to be taken on a case by case basis.