Skip to content
Back to sections

Health and safety

Health and safety is an essential and legal requirement for all organisations. You’ll need to consider and continually review how safe your asset and activities that you deliver and plan to deliver are.

Your organisation becomes responsible for health and safety of the asset from the point of handover, and once building control has signed off any works, so it’s important that health and safety is considered and effective practices are put in place from the very outset.

Community organisations have a duty of care towards everyone who uses their assets or is part of their workforce, either in a voluntary or paid capacity.

This means protecting their physical and mental well-being and ensuring reasonable steps are taken to assess and mitigate against risks.

Staff and volunteers should be trained to consider the health and safety implications in all decisions they make and be provided with suitable safety equipment. 

  • Fire regulations

    You should carefully consider the fire safety risk to your facility. You’re responsible for fire safety if you’re:
    • an employer
    • the owner or landlord
    • an occupier
    • anyone else with control of the premises, for example a facilities manager, building manager, managing agent or risk assessor.

    The responsible parties must:

    • carry out a fire risk assessment of the premises and review it regularly
    • put in place, and maintain, appropriate fire safety measures
    • plan for an emergency
    • provide staff information, fire safety instruction, and training.

    You could be fined or go to prison if you don’t follow fire safety regulations and you should get a fire safety officer to carry out a risk assessment to help you understand the regulations and comply with them.

     Hide

  • First aid

    First aiders should be readily available at all times. 

    An accident book for the asset should also be in place and be used to record all incidents. Reviewing this book can be helpful to identify any recurring issues, so steps can be put in place to stop them happening.

    Some buildings operate without staff or volunteers on site; if this is the case, any booking agreements should make it clear that there are no first aiders on site and that the hirer is responsible for first aid. 

     Hide
Previous section: 6a Next section: Continue to 6c