With the Fee for Intervention scheme just around the corner are you sure that your business is receiving the right health and safety advice?

A lot has been said of health and safety advice over the last 12-18 months. Following the Lord Young review, the HSE was tasked with setting up a Consultants Register (known as OHSCR).

From our own experiences, many businesses are not fully aware of the register. We do know that in future the HSE approach is going to be that if a business uses consultants not on the register then the HSE may consider they have not received the necessary level of competent advice (of course for low risk businesses this is unlikely to be applied).

So will employing a consultant on the register really guarantee you have received the best advice possible? The scheme does require all consultants to be qualified to a high level, and it also requires the application of the principle of “proportionate advice”, so in many respects it does provide a sound platform for businesses to search from.

However with so many consultants now on the register (over 2700) how does a business decide who will provide the best advice available? A starting point needs to be to see what other businesses are saying about the consultants and what testimonials and case studies can be viewed.

However we at MESH feel that a business should receive more and that is why we have introduced our 100% Guarantee for 2012. The guarantee is that we will support our belief that:

MESH clients are happy clients. We provide highly professional Health & Safety training & services that guarantee our clients will never have to worry about a visit from the HSE. Our guarantee is that, in the unlikely event of any negative contact from the HSE, we will be available (free) to support you in your response. All we ask is that you have followed and implemented Health & Safety recommendations that we make as part of our work for you.

Does this sound like an approach that you have received from consultants you have used in the past?