Hi Loco
This is one of those situations where one size is very unlikely to fit all......
OK, let's start with the GB legal requirement in Section 2(3) of HSWA (with a parallel to extend that to the NI, thence incorporating all of the UK).
Statement of "general policy" and of the "organisation and arrangements" for its implementation.
Nothing in Section 2(3) says that this all has to be in a single document and, in my opinion, the sensible organisations of any size don't attempt to cram it all into a single document.
So, why not an all embracing short document setting out the organisation's overall position that will apply globally.
Then work out what bits of the "organisation and arrangements" will work:
(a) globally
(b) across a whole region e.g Europe
(c) what needs to be bespoke to a country or even part of a country?
+ within (a), (b) and (c) what will be appropriate whatever the work, and what needs to be bespoke to people doing certain things. I'll come back to this at the end.
Nobody is going to read a health and safety policy statement if it sets out the minutiae of when fire alarms need to be tested.
When I worked for the HSE, on a single occasion I wrote a prosecution report with just a single charge relating to the H&S policy.
....and it didn't say that the organisation (a construction contractor) didn't have one but rather that it hadn't brought it to the attention of all its employees.
So, it got to Court and the company pleaded guilty but the Defence solicitor asked the Sheriff if he would like to see the policy statement in force at the time of the incident (and noted that it had been amended in the meantime).
The document was 30 pages long.
The Sheriff asked the Defence solicitor whether he was expected to read this.
"No, My Lord, I was just trying to demonstrate that my client did have the relevant document."
"It's 30 pages long."
"Yes, My Lord."
"Do you expect a joiner to use this as bedtime reading on a Thursday night?"
"No, My Lord."
"Do you expect that perhaps a bricklayer will take it down to the pub on a Friday night to discuss it with their workmates?"
"No, My Lord".
"Well it's far too long, isn't it? It should be one or two pages long so that it can be easily read and assimilated."
Spot on.
A few years later, I started a job as my employer's very first in-house OSH professional.
To help me the company had commissioned a consultant to draft a health and safety policy statement.
It was 300 pages long!!
To be fair the consultant had obviously done their homework, so it covered everything that our staff might be expected to regularly encounter.
But my comment to the architect of my job on my very first morning in said job was that how one safeguarded a circular saw on a construction site was of absolutely no relevance to our admin staff in head office.
I did promise to recycle some of the work done by the consultant (though I am not sure that I did as I am just as capable of cutting and pasting from HSE guidance on circular saws etc etc etc as the consultant).
But we got out a statement of general policy that ran to less than two pages.
Then systems, then guidance.
A few years later, we decided we should get into railways.
Now railway have their own rules. We could have taken those rules on board and applied them to ALL our operations but to do that would have had huge repercussions.
So, instead we put in place rail specific procedures to supplement our company wide systems.