Have you ever thought about the quality of the health & safety advice you are getting?

Just because someone tells you they are experts; that may not always be the truth. We come across many businesses who have followed advice that should have provided protection but when things have gone wrong the consultant has been lacking knowledge and experience.

As a business you have to put trust in others that’s clear; no business can be experts in everything and some help is often necessary.  The problem is the law expects you to employ competent persons and your business is still responsible for making sure you have employed the right persons. That can clearly be a dilemma for some.

The health & safety world has tried to improve this by giving advice to the business world to look for suitably qualified and experienced persons; and avoid choosing on price alone. However only last week we found this had failed and one new client who had over a number of years experience has been advised by a consultancy who charged them £750 per day for their advice. Clearly not picked as a cheap provider; the client put trust in these consultants.

However,  it all went wrong after a major incident and the two parties parted ways.  We was asked to comment on the quality of some of the risk assessments this consultancy had provided and we were amazed at just how poor they were. This business has been terribly let down and now has to re-look at its risk assessments and review what health & safety controls need to be improved.

As someone said to me recently you have to be careful who you chose to listen to and this applies to health & safety as it does in every other aspect of running a successful business. So my word of caution is to make sure you research fully who you employ and look to see what others are saying about any consultancy before making the decision to employ them.