Every employer has to appoint a competent person. Here's what that actually means.
A competent person is someone with the skills, knowledge and experience to help you meet your health and safety duties. Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, every employer must appoint one or more. They don't have to be an employee. You can appoint someone in-house, bring in an external consultant, or use a mix of both.
"Competent" has a legal meaning. It isn't a job title or a single certificate.
It's about whether the person genuinely understands the hazards in your work and can give you sound advice on controlling them. The law sets out the duty plainly, and the wording matters.
Regulation 7 of the Management Regulations says you must appoint one or more competent persons to help you comply with health and safety law. It is not optional.
The law expects you to give preference to a suitably competent person from within your own business where one is available, and to look outside only where there isn't.
What the HSE looks for is a sensible match between the person's knowledge and the risk in your work. The standard scales with your hazards.
A competent person should be able to do four things.
There's no single certificate that makes someone "competent" by law. What matters is whether their knowledge and experience match the risks in your work. In practice, a competent person can:
The hazards in your specific activities, not the generic ones lifted off a template. Your work, your site, your risks.
Weigh how serious each risk is and decide what control is reasonably practicable, rather than applying a blanket rule.
Tell you which legislation applies and what you must do to meet it, in language you can act on.
Recognise when a specialist is needed and bring that expertise in rather than guessing. A good competent person knows what they don't know.
You have three routes.
Whichever you choose, the legal duty to comply stays with you as the employer. What changes is where the day-to-day expertise sits.
A named, qualified consultant who stands behind the advice they give you.
We act as the appointed competent person for businesses across construction, care, manufacturing and professional services. You get a named, qualified consultant, the same person every time, who learns your sites and your risks. That means your risk assessments are written for your actual work, your policies reflect how you operate, and when something unexpected happens, or the HSE makes contact, you have a senior specialist to call rather than a guess to make. The duty to comply stays yours. The heavy lifting of competence becomes ours.
The H&S specialist who acts as your competent person.
You get one named consultant, qualified in health and safety, and you keep them. They learn your sites, your people and the way you actually work, so when you ring, they already know your business and stand behind the advice they give.
“I work with businesses to provide practical, hands-on health and safety advice. It's important that you have the right systems and procedures in place, but they need to be written for your business and not just be generic. We provide a very hands-on approach with one nominated consultant as your point of contact — no call centres.”
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Tell us your situation and a named consultant will give you a straight answer on whether you need to appoint a competent person, and what that should look like for your business. No script and no obligation.