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Our role in health and safety

Employers should ensure the health and safety of their employees by providing safe working conditions.

Our aim is to ensure, through education and enforcement, that employers ensure the health, safety and welfare of their employees, by:
  • Providing safe working conditions
  • Giving adequate training in safe working practices, to minimise the risk of illness or injury.

Protecting the health and safety of other people such as customers in a shop or contractors working at your premises, who may be affected by work activities, are also our concern.

We are entirely impartial and work with employers and employees with the aim of securing satisfactory health, safety and welfare standards.

Our work involves

  • Providing advice and information
  • Inspection of workplaces
  • Investigation of accidents, dangerous occurrences or outbreaks of industrial disease
  • Enforcement of the standards required by law, usually by advice, legal notice, and where appropriate by prosecution

We always try to ensure that our requirements are proportionate to the degree of risk to health or safety.

Inspections and inspector rights

Our health & safety Inspectors have the right to enter work premises at any reasonable time. Where an Inspector has reason to believe that danger exists, entry may be gained at any time.

Inspectors do not normally make appointments and will usually visit without advanced notice.

A programme of inspection is operated based on a nationally agreed priority rating scheme. 

Our responsibility

We are responsible at all workplaces in our district, where the following are the workplaces' main activity:

  • Offices (except government offices)
  • Shops
  • Hotels
  • Restaurants
  • Leisure premises
  • Nurseries and playgroups
  • Pubs and clubs
  • Museums (privately owned)
  • Places of worship
  • Sheltered accommodation and care homes

Health & Safety Executive

The Health & Safety Executive (HSE) are the relevant enforcement agency for the following workplaces:

  • Factories
  • Farms
  • Building sites
  • Mines
  • Schools and colleges
  • Fairgrounds
  • Gas, electricity and water systems
  • Hospitals and nursing homes
  • Central and local government premises
  • Offshore installations

Health and Safety Training

We no longer provides health and safety training courses.

Cooling Towers

All premises where cooling towers and evaporative condensers are situated must register with the local authority under The Notification of Cooling Towers and Evaporative Condensers Regulations 1992.

The company needs to provide us with details of:

  • Where the notifiable plant is located
  • The person in control of the premises
  • The number of devices at the premises and their approximate location

The purpose of this is to prevent or control the spread of legionellosis (including Legionnaires disease).

We maintain a register of Cooling Towers in the district.

Please contact the Environmental Health team for more information.

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