EHS & HS Policy Statements

Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA) 1974


This legal Act places a legal duty on employers to ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, the health, safety, and welfare of employees, and to ensure that employees and others are kept safe. Under the Act you have an obligation to ensure any potential risk of work-related violence is eliminated or controlled.

If you have five or more employees you must have a written health and safety policy statement on file, setting out how you manage health and safety in your organisation.

Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations (MHSWR) 1999

These regulations require employers to consider the health and safety risks to employees and to carry out a risk assessment to protect employees from exposure to reasonably foreseeable risks. Those risks include work-related violence. A risk assessment is an examination to:

  • Determine what hazards exist in the workplace.
  • Establish the significance of the risk.
  • Identify and implement prevention and control measures.
  • Produce a clear management action plan.

If you have five or more employees, you must record the significant findings of your risk assessment and any groups of employees identified by it as being especially at risk. In addition, employers have a requirement to appoint competent people, set up emergency procedures, and provide information to employees and work together with employers sharing the same workplace.

Employees, on the other hand, are required to use the information/training they have received, and to report dangerous situations/shortcomings in health and safety arrangements.