The question that follows is whether to recruit or to retain. It is a genuine decision with real trade-offs, and it is worth making deliberately rather than defaulting to whichever option is in front of you.
What the law leaves to you
Regulation 7 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires every employer to appoint one or more competent persons to assist in meeting statutory duties. Competence is defined in Regulation 7(5) as having “sufficient training and experience or knowledge and other qualities” to properly assist.
Regulation 7(8) then says that “where there is a competent person in the employer’s employment, that person shall be appointed… in preference to a competent person not in his employment.”
That preference is real but conditional. It applies where an internally employed competent person exists. If nobody inside the business meets the standard for your risk profile, the preference does not engage and the duty is met externally.
The law also permits more than one appointment. For most businesses of any complexity, the honest answer is not one or the other.
The case for in-house
Presence. A safety manager who is on site sees the guard that was left off, hears the grumble about the new procedure, and notices the temporary arrangement that has quietly become permanent. No amount of scheduled visiting replicates continuous presence.
Cultural influence. Health and safety culture is built through hundreds of small interactions. Someone who is part of the organisation, attends the production meeting, and has relationships with supervisors can shift behaviour in a way an external adviser generally cannot.
Operational context. An internal appointee understands the commercial pressures, the customer deadlines, and why a particular shortcut is tempting. That knowledge produces more workable solutions.
Immediate availability. When something happens at 6am, they are already there.
The real cost. A competent health and safety manager in the North West typically commands a salary in the region of £40,000 to £60,000 depending on experience and sector, and considerably more at chartered level or with multi-site responsibility. Add employer’s National Insurance, pension contributions, training, professional membership, equipment and recruitment costs, and the fully loaded figure is meaningfully higher than the headline salary.
The case for outsourced support
Breadth of specialism. Health and safety is not one discipline. Machinery safety, occupational hygiene, noise and vibration, fire, CDM, environmental compliance and process safety are distinct fields. No single individual is expert in all of them. A consultancy can bring the right specialism to the right problem.
Pattern recognition. A consultant working across many sites sees what is going wrong across a sector. That is a form of intelligence that an in-house appointee, however capable, cannot easily acquire from one organisation.
Independence. An external adviser has no line manager whose production targets depend on the answer. When the finding is commercially unwelcome, that independence has value — both practically and, if it ever comes to it, evidentially.
Continuity. People leave, go on long-term sick leave, and take holiday. A single in-house appointment is a single point of failure. A retained arrangement generally covers absence as standard.
Predictable cost. A fixed-fee arrangement gives you a known annual figure. There is no recruitment risk, no notice period, and no cost of a bad hire — which in a specialist role can be considerable, and may not become apparent until something goes wrong.
The limitations, honestly stated. An external consultant is not on site every day. They will not overhear things. Where a consultancy arrangement is poorly structured — an annual audit that produces a report and disappears — it delivers documentation rather than risk reduction. The value depends entirely on how the relationship is designed.
How to decide
Four questions, in order.
1. What is your actual risk profile?
Not headcount. Risk.
A 150-person professional services firm in an office has a genuinely modest health and safety profile: display screen equipment, fire, stress, occasional work at height for maintenance. A 30-person engineering firm running presses, welding, forklifts and hazardous substances has more significant risk than the office of five times the size.
High-hazard operations need frequent, competent presence. Lower-hazard operations may need periodic specialist input and a good system.
2. Is there enough work to justify a full-time role?
Be honest about this. A full-time safety manager in a low-hazard 40-person business will spend a portion of their week generating documentation that nobody needs, because the role has to be filled. That is neither good value nor good for the person.
Conversely, a part-time or fractional in-house appointment sometimes fails for the opposite reason: the role is genuinely full-time in a business that has budgeted for two days a week.
3. Where does your competence actually sit today?
Map it. For each significant risk — machinery, substances, noise, vibration, fire, work at height, contractors, transport — ask who in the business is competent to assess and manage it.
Most businesses find they have strong coverage in two or three areas and none in the rest. That map tells you what you need, and it is usually more specific than “we need a safety person.”
4. What happens when the person is unavailable?
Whatever you choose, resilience matters. A single in-house appointment with no cover, and a consultancy relationship with one named individual and no backup, both fail in the same way.
The combination that usually works
For most businesses in the ten-to-two-hundred employee range, the effective arrangement is not either/or. It is:
Internal ownership. A named person, part of the management team, who owns day-to-day health and safety, knows the site, and drives the culture. They do not need to be a chartered practitioner. They need enough competence for the routine, and enough judgement to know when something is beyond them.
External specialist support. A named consultant who provides the technical assessments the internal person cannot — PUWER assessments, noise and exposure surveys, LEV specification, fire risk assessment, CDM advice — carries out periodic independent audit, keeps the business informed of regulatory change, and is available when something unexpected happens.
This structure satisfies Regulation 7 comfortably, since the regulation permits multiple appointments. More importantly, it produces better outcomes than either arrangement alone, because it combines presence with specialism.
Questions to ask a consultancy before you commit
If you go down the retained route, the structure of the arrangement matters more than the headline fee.
- Who is my named consultant, and will it be the same person each time? Continuity is most of the value.
- Are they OSHCR-registered, and what is their sector experience? The Occupational Safety and Health Consultants Register is a voluntary register with defined competence criteria and professional body membership — a straightforward way to verify credentials.
- What is included in the fee, and what is charged extra? Site visits, audits, policy and risk assessment development, training, accident investigation, accreditation support, telephone advice. Ambiguity here is where retained arrangements sour.
- What happens if the HSE turns up unannounced? Ask about availability and response times specifically, not in general terms.
- What is the deliverable? A report is not a deliverable. A prioritised action plan with owners and dates, followed up at the next visit, is.
- How do you keep us informed of regulatory change? Health and safety law does not stand still, and the enforcement focus has moved noticeably towards occupational health in recent years.
The cost of getting it wrong
Whichever route you take, the comparison worth holding in mind is not the cost of support against zero.
Where an HSE inspector identifies a material breach, costs are recovered under the Fee for Intervention scheme at £188 per hour from 1 April 2026, covering investigation, correspondence and follow-up. In 2024/25 the HSE issued around 4,400 enforcement notices, brought 246 prosecutions with a 96% conviction rate, and courts imposed fines exceeding £33 million.
Fines are set from turnover under the Sentencing Council’s definitive guideline. For a small organisation — turnover between £2 million and £10 million — a serious offence readily reaches six figures. For a large organisation, high culpability and category 1 harm carries a starting point of £2.4 million.
None of which counts the disruption of a prohibition notice, the management time absorbed by an investigation, the civil claim, or the effect on a workforce that has watched a colleague get hurt.
Soteria (UK) Ltd offers an Annual Fixed Fee Health and Safety Compliance service: a complete outsourced service with proactive support to help you meet your legal obligations, and a named OSHCR-registered consultant so you always deal with someone who knows your business. We work with clients throughout the UK and Ireland, with advice and support available 24-7-365.
Call 01925 626283 or email info@soteriauk.co.uk to talk through which arrangement fits your business.
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