Self-Employed? How Health & Safety Laws Apply To You
Do you have to worry about any health & safety laws when self-employed, or can you ignore them? It’s one of those grey areas that people misinterpret all the time, so this post will clear everything up for you.
In short, you may have to contend with and abide by health & safety laws as a self-employed individual. It all depends on how your business is set up and what you do – let’s explain.
When You Don’t Need To Worry About Health & Safety Laws
To be honest, the only time you don’t need to concern yourself with health & safety laws is when you’re self-employed and working alone with no risks posed to anyone else. For example, you work from home and do all of your work from a computer, never needing to physically interact with clients.
In a scenario like this, you are the only person at risk of anything.
Therefore, the law does not require you to take any additional precautions. Why? Because if you injure yourself or have an accident, you’re the only one who will suffer the consequences. By all means, it helps if you follow some basic work-from-home safety tips to prevent incidents, but you don’t have any legal issues to worry about.
Why You Should Worry About Health & Safety Laws
On the other side of the spectrum, you will need to concern yourself with health & safety laws if any of the following are true:
- You employee at least one individual
- You work from a commercial business premises
- Your work poses possible H&S risks to other people
- You work within these sectors: construction, agriculture, railway operations, gas, asbestos & genetically modified organisms
As per the current laws, you will need to uphold specific health & safety standards in any of these cases. The law applies even if you just employ one person on a short-term contract. Keep in mind that you won’t need to tick every box on this list. For instance, you could have a business premises, but no employees, and it still demands that you follow laws.
You’ll need fire risk assessments for your premises, safety signage and so on. It’s because there’s an assumption that working from a commercial premises means someone will interact with your business at some point – this could be clients, suppliers, etc. As such, there’s always the slight risk of incidents occurring.
What To Do About Health & Safety Laws
The best way to ensure you comply with the law is by checking out the Health and Safety Executive website. It is packed full of resources explaining what you need to do and how you make yourself compliant. Remember, this is essential if you tick just one of the boxes listed in the previous section.
With that in mind it’s also important to recognise when you might go from not needing to follow health & safety laws, to needing to follow them. E.g. You begin self-employed life working alone from home, but you start expanding by either hiring employees or moving into an office.
To summarise everything for you: self-employed individuals don’t need to follow basic health & safety laws if they work alone, work from home and aren’t involved in any of the six high-risk industries noted earlier.
