Health and Safety Policy for Trade Businesses UK — What You Need and How to Write It (2026)

Who needs a written health and safety policy?

Section 2(3) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 places the legal duty squarely on employers. If your business employs five or more people, you must have a written health and safety policy. That threshold counts all employees — full-time, part-time, and fixed-term — not just those on the tools.

Sole traders and partnerships with no employees are technically exempt from the written-policy requirement, though they remain subject to the general duty to conduct their undertaking safely. In practice, however, any trade business pursuing commercial work should have a written policy regardless of headcount. Approved contractor schemes like CHAS, Constructionline, and SafeContractor all expect one as part of the vetting process. Many main contractors require it before they will even issue a purchase order. Having a policy signals to clients that your business is professionally run.

The three parts of a health and safety policy

The HSE is explicit: a compliant health and safety policy must have three distinct sections. A single page of generic statements will not satisfy an inspector or a diligent main contractor. The three sections are:

• Statement of Intent — your general commitment to managing health and safety
• Organisation — who is responsible for what within your business
• Arrangements — the specific operational procedures for the risks your business faces

Each section must be present and must be tailored to your business. A policy downloaded from a generic template site and left unchanged is not a compliant policy — the HSE and an experienced main contractor's safety team will spot it immediately.

Section 1: Statement of Intent

The Statement of Intent is your business's top-level commitment to health and safety. It should be concise — half a page to one page — but it must cover the following points:

• A commitment to providing a safe and healthy working environment
• A commitment to complying with all relevant legislation and guidance
• A statement that health and safety is given equal priority to production and commercial objectives
• A commitment to consulting with employees and their representatives
• A statement that adequate resources will be provided to implement the policy

Critically, the Statement of Intent must be signed and dated by the most senior person in the business — typically the owner, managing director, or sole director. An unsigned policy carries no legal weight. The signature confirms that leadership has personally endorsed the policy.

Display the signed statement in your workplace — whether that's your yard, office, or depot — and make it available to all workers. Workers have a legal right to see it. The policy should include the date it was last reviewed. Review it at minimum annually; after any serious incident; after any change in legislation; and whenever the nature of your work or workforce changes significantly.

Section 2: Organisation

The Organisation section sets out who is responsible for health and safety across your business. For a small firm, this is straightforward. For a larger operation with site managers, supervisors, and subcontractors, it needs to be more detailed.

At minimum, the section should name:

• The responsible person — the employer or a nominated director with overall accountability for health and safety. For most trade businesses with fewer than 20 employees, this is the owner.
• The competent person — under regulation 7 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, every employer must appoint one or more competent persons to assist them. For small businesses, this is often the owner themselves or an external health and safety consultant.
• Supervisors and site managers — their specific H&S responsibilities on site, including pre-start briefings, toolbox talks, and ensuring risk controls are in place.
• Worker responsibilities — employees are not passive recipients. Under section 7 of the Act, workers must take reasonable care of their own safety and that of others, and must cooperate with their employer.

If you use subcontractors regularly, state how their competence is assessed before engagement and how they are integrated into your site safety arrangements. This is particularly important under CDM 2015 where the duty to coordinate extends to all those working on a project.

Section 3: Arrangements

The Arrangements section is the operational heart of your policy. It sets out, in practical terms, how you manage each significant risk your business faces. This section will be the longest and the most specific. Generic arrangements are a red flag in any audit — they suggest the employer has not genuinely thought through their risks.

For most trade businesses, the Arrangements section should cover:

• Risk assessment process — how risk assessments are carried out, by whom, when they are reviewed, and how findings are communicated to workers.
• COSHH — how hazardous substances are identified, how COSHH assessments are produced and kept on file, substitution and control hierarchies, and PPE requirements for specific substances.
• Working at height — how work at height is planned, what equipment is permitted (scaffolding, tower scaffolds, MEWPs, ladders for short-duration low-risk work only), rescue planning, and inspection regimes.
• Manual handling — assessment of manual handling tasks, avoidance through mechanical aids where practicable, and training requirements.
• Electrical safety — inspection and testing of portable tools, use of RCDs, identification of live services before any penetration work, and competency requirements for electrical work.
• PPE — the hierarchy of controls (PPE is the last resort, not the first), what PPE is provided, how it is maintained and inspected, and worker obligations.
• Accident reporting — internal reporting procedures, RIDDOR obligations (reporting of specified injuries, over-seven-day injuries, and dangerous occurrences to the HSE), and how investigations are carried out.
• First aid — first aid provision adequate to the risk level of your work, named first aiders or appointed persons, location of first aid kits, and how provision is maintained on multi-site operations.
• Toolbox talks — frequency, topics, who delivers them, and how attendance is recorded.
• Fire procedures — fire risk assessment obligations, emergency procedures for sites and premises, fire marshal appointments.
• Plant and equipment maintenance — inspection schedules, pre-use checks, defect reporting, and how out-of-service equipment is taken out of use.

Risk assessments: the engine of your policy

Your health and safety policy sets the framework, but risk assessments are where the actual management of risk happens. Every trade business must carry out suitable and sufficient risk assessments under regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. Businesses with five or more employees must record the significant findings.

There is an important distinction between a generic risk assessment and a site-specific risk assessment. A generic assessment covers a type of activity — for example, working at height using a mobile scaffold tower — and applies across your business. A site-specific assessment takes account of the particular hazards and conditions on a specific site: the proximity of the public, existing services, ground conditions, access restrictions. Commercial clients and main contractors will almost always require site-specific assessments, not generic ones.

When a risk assessment is combined with a method statement describing how the work will be carried out safely, the combined document is known as a RAMS (Risk Assessment and Method Statement). RAMS are required on virtually every commercial site in the UK and on all notifiable construction projects under CDM 2015. They should be job-specific, reviewed before work starts, and signed by the workers who will carry out the task as confirmation they have been briefed.

CDM 2015 and the duty to cooperate

The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 impose health and safety duties that apply to virtually all construction work — including the fit-out, maintenance, and repair work that most trade businesses carry out on a daily basis.

Your position under CDM 2015 depends on how the project is structured:

• Contractor — if you are working under a main contractor or principal contractor, you are a contractor under CDM. You must plan, manage, and monitor your own work so that it is carried out without risks to health and safety. You must cooperate with the principal contractor, comply with their site rules, and provide any information relevant to the health and safety file.
• Principal Contractor — if there is no main contractor above you on a project with more than one contractor, you may be the principal contractor. This carries significant additional duties: producing and maintaining a Construction Phase Plan, coordinating the work of all contractors on site, and managing the overall health and safety of the construction phase.

On notifiable projects (those lasting more than 30 working days with more than 20 workers simultaneously, or exceeding 500 person-days), the HSE must be notified. A health and safety file must be compiled and handed to the client on completion. Your health and safety policy and your RAMS documents feed directly into these CDM obligations.

Enforcement and penalties

The HSE has broad enforcement powers. An inspector can visit your premises or any site where you are working, with or without notice. They can examine records, interview workers, take photographs and samples, and issue formal notices.

If an inspector finds a breach of health and safety law, they have three main enforcement tools:

• Improvement Notice — requires you to remedy a contravention within a specified time period, usually at least 21 days.
• Prohibition Notice — issued where there is a risk of serious personal injury. The activity must stop immediately. Work cannot resume until the inspector is satisfied the risk has been controlled.
• Prosecution — for serious breaches. Corporate bodies face unlimited fines. Individual directors and sole traders face unlimited fines and, in the most serious cases, imprisonment. Courts routinely impose six-figure fines on small and medium trade businesses for preventable accidents.

Even where no enforcement notice is issued, businesses that are found to be in material breach of health and safety law are subject to the HSE's Fee for Intervention (FFI) scheme. Under FFI, the HSE recovers its inspection and investigation costs from the business at £166 per hour (2026 rate). An investigation following a serious incident can quickly run to thousands of pounds before any prosecution is considered.

Directors and senior managers should note that personal liability under section 37 of the Act means that individuals — not just the company — can be prosecuted if a contravention was committed with their consent, connivance, or as a result of their neglect. A well-maintained health and safety policy, with evidence that it was implemented and reviewed, is one of the most effective demonstrations that a director took their obligations seriously.

Keeping your policy up to date

A health and safety policy that was written five years ago and has not been touched since is worse than no policy at all in some respects — it demonstrates that management is not engaged with the process. An out-of-date policy can also create legal exposure if it refers to superseded regulations or outdated procedures that workers are no longer following.

Review your policy whenever any of the following occur:

• Annually as a minimum — date the review and have it signed again
• After any accident, near miss, or dangerous occurrence, including any RIDDOR-reportable incident
• When new risks arise — a new type of work, new equipment, new substances
• When relevant regulations or approved codes of practice are updated
• When your workforce structure changes significantly — crossing the five-employee threshold, taking on subcontractors, appointing a new site manager
• After an HSE inspection, whether or not a notice was issued

Keep a version history at the back of the document noting the date of each review and the main changes made. This creates an audit trail that demonstrates the policy is a living document, not a one-off exercise.

Finally, communicate changes to your workers. A policy revision that remains in the filing cabinet is not effective. Brief your team when the arrangements change — a toolbox talk is an efficient way to do this — and record who attended.