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Health & Safety Enforcement Team
Enforcement team
If your business is a public/consumer facing organisation, then
Redbridge Council will be responsible for ensuring that you
conform to health and safety legislation.
Our Environmental Health Officers (EHOs) are local authority
inspectors, who want you to meet all
of the necessary requirements.
If your organisation is higher risk (a factory, a building site,
a mine, an offshore chemical plant and/or nuclear installation),
then the Health and Safety Executive will be responsible for
monitoring you.
What do we do?
Our EHOs aim to prevent accidents and ill-health.
- inspect workplaces to ensure that any work risks are managed
properly
- help people to meet their legal responsibilities
- make good practice recommendations
- investigate accidents or occupational ill-health
- explore complaints regarding working conditions and/or
practices
- act as a source of advice on any aspect of health and
safety
- promote awareness/knowledge of safety issues through campaigns,
newsletters, seminar or training courses.
Why might we visit ?
We will visit if we feel that either your employees or the
public are at risk from unsafe activities within your
business. The more serious the risk, or the breach, the more
regularly we will visit. If there has been an accident in
the workplace, our EHOs will drop in to your organisation upon
notification.
This depends on why the visit is being made and the type of
workplace being visited. General inspections are influenced
by the extent of risk (to both employees and the public) so
that, as a rule, places with more serious risks, or where the risks
have been poorly controlled in the past, will be visited more
regularly. All accident notifications are assessed by
environmental health officers and may result in an investigative
visit, depending on a number of factors including
the severity of the injury, potential for recurrence,
extent of possible breaches of legislation, type of accident and
past record of the business.
Inspections are usually unannounced but, where necessary, can be
made by appointment. Environmental health officers will
probably want to talk to managers, supervisors, employees, health
and safety representatives and other interested persons.
In addition to looking around your premises, officers will
examine safety-related paperwork such as:
- risk assessments (if applicable)
- plant maintenance and inspection records
- training records
- accident records
- health and safety policy statement (if applicable)
EHOs are under a legal obligation to tell employees about
issues affecting their health, safety or welfare at their
workplace. This may be done verbally at the time of the
officer's visit and possibly by sending a copy of any
correspondence to employees.
At the end of the visit you will be advised by the officer
what further action, if any, is going to be taken. If you are
going to be contacted in writing, you will be told when you
can expect to hear by. In any correspondence you will be
provided with useful and relevant advice on what you need to
do.
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