Safety Statements

A Safety Statement is a legal requirement for all employers. The company Safety Statement is a written document which describes how Health and Safety within your company is managed. A Health and Safety Statement is your duty of care to your employees to manage risks and hazards in the workplace.

It is important that your safety statement represents the type of work you do and identifies the risks specific to your work activity. The Safety Statement is based on the principle that safety can be managed because most accidents and ill-health are foreseeable and can usually be prevented. The Safety Statement should be used to plan and control everything that is done in the workplace so that accidents don’t occur.

Most businesses I work with already have safety procedures in place, because nobody wants anyone to get hurt on site. They just don’t have them down on paper and have not gone through the formal process of communicating them to the relevant people. This is what your safety statement does, it puts on paper your safety work procedures.

Risk Assessment

Risk assessment is the overall process of hazard identification, risk analysis and risk evaluation.  It is a legal requirement for employers and certain self-employed people.  There is no simple way to identify hazards or do a risk assessment, nor will a single technique apply in all situations.  Identifying and ranking hazards requires knowledge of workplace activities, the urgency of situations, and most importantly, objective judgement.  An assessment can literally be a checklist, a probability matrix or a discussion but they are very important as they form part of an overall health and safety management plan.  Ranking hazards is one way to help determine which risk is the most serious and thus which to control first.  Priority is usually established by accounting for employee exposure and the potential for incident, injury or illness.

Method Statements

Method statements are specific work plans for a particular project. They follow all the general rules of your safety statement but add in site-specific information, site risks and control measures. A method statement is usually necessary for higher risk work, and it is commonly used within the construction, demolition and engineering sectors.

These statements are important because they detail exactly how to implement safety measures and help teams eliminate risks associated with a job. This is especially significant when projects involve high-risk elements like dangerous equipment, hazardous materials or heights and are an essential tool for mitigating risks and protecting site visitors, construction workers and project managers from harm. Method statements provide detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to safely perform a work-related task. It is designed to outline the hazards likely to be encountered while undertaking a task or process as well as give detailed guidance to help mitigate the risks. It can also be a useful monitoring tool for checking that the working methods set out in the statement are put into practice on site.