Your legal health and safety responsibilities

As an employer, you must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare of your workforce. This duty includes:

• providing and maintaining safe equipment and systems of work
• ensuring the safe use, handling, storage and transport of articles and substances
• giving employees the information, instruction, training and supervision needed to work safely
• keeping workplaces under your control (to any extent) safe and without health risks, including providing and maintaining safe access and exit routes
• maintaining a working environment that is safe, without health risks, and with adequate welfare facilities.

If employees work at locations you don't control, you have no duty under these laws. However, you should still take reasonable steps to ensure they have access to sanitary and washing facilities, either by arranging for them to use existing site facilities or providing temporary ones.

Employees also have a duty to take reasonable care of their own health and safety and that of others, and to cooperate with you in meeting legal requirements.

If you have control over non-domestic premises used by non-employees for work, or over entrances, exits, equipment, or substances in those premises, you must take reasonable steps to ensure they are safe and do not pose a health risk.