Legal Compliance
A cost-effective support service that ensures your compliance with health and safety legislation.
[Please note that the products listed here are designed for Great British law. If you are operating in Northern Ireland different legislation will apply and some development work would be needed. We also have direct experience of systems in other EU countries so may be able to help if you have operations outside the UK.]
It is necessary for every organisation to comply fully with all relevant health and safety legislation and the penalties for not doing so can be severe. It is the responsibility of senior management to take steps to ensure compliance. The only real solution is to have in place a procedure that ensures compliance with legislation is being effectively managed. The acid test is whether the following three questions can be answered positively.
- Do you have a comprehensive and up-to-date list of the legislation that applies to your organisation?
- Have you identified all the requirements imposed by all relevant items of legislation?
- Are you systematically measuring the extent to which your organisation is complying with relevant legislation?
If you cannot answer these questions positively with absolute certainty, we can help. Safety law is complex and it is not always easy to understand its implications for your organisation. Putting in place a process for ensuring legal compliance with health and safety legislation does not need to be stressful, time consuming or overly expensive. Hastam offers three services that provide a comprehensive solution to these issues at a modest annual cost, detailed below.
We offer you:
Hastam's Legal Resister service keeps you on top of the task. It involves a highly experienced Hastam consultant identifying the legislation relevant to your organisation. There are more than 500 pieces of legislation that might be relevant but on the basis of a discussion and site visit we screen out any specialist legislation that would not be relevant. When we have agreed with you which legislation is relevant we prepare, and supply you with, an electronic copy of all the titles of all the relevant legislation and a summary of the key requirements of all the legislation on the list. This is your Legal Register.
Unfortunately, however, legislation changes, which creates the need for the provision of updates. Hastam monitors all published legislation, identifies health and safety legislation, and obtains details of all new and revised health and safety legal requirements. On a quarterly basis, subscribers to the Legal Register Service are sent details of required changes to their Legal Register or, if they wish of all changes to health and safety legislation in the past quarter.
As part of this service Hastam will also complete an annual review of your Legal Register. This involves you sending a copy of your Legal Register to Hastam so that we can check it against our master copies. By doing this we can identify lost or corrupted information and incorrect information which has been added inadvertently.
To enable you to put in place a robust auditing regime to demonstrate compliance and identify improvement actions Hastam provides software and an Audit Tool, together with training and guidance for their effective use.
The software is the well proven CHASE package, which is easy and straightforward to use. Initially developed over twenty years ago the current version reflects modern technology and the aspirations of its many users.
The Audit Tool is a Legal Compliance Module question set aligned to your legal register. The module is then updated on a quarterly basis at the same time as your Legal Register. Typically this involves additional or revised question sets needed to satisfy changes in legal requirements. In addition there is an annual review as for the Legal Register. Used as recommended, this powerful Audit Tool creates clarity and provides the data senior managers require if they are to have confidence in the organisation's legal compliance
Hastam can also provide an external audit of compliance. This service is carried out by Hastam consultants who visit your premises and complete an audit of your compliance with an agreed sample of the legislation in your Legal Register. They then compare their findings with the information recorded from the audits in your Legal Compliance Module. This service provides you with both an external assessment of your degree of compliance and an assessment of the accuracy of your internal measurement of compliance. The cost of the audit is dependent on the extent of exercise you require.
We can assist any organisation meet its legal obligations to manage health and safety - charitable, public and private sector.
For more details as to how Hastam could assist your organisation address your H&S legal compliance challenges contact Liz Shuttleworth using our contact request form.
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