Delta-Simons have been supporting a global software provider with fulfilling their Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) compliance obligations for their offices in the UK since 2006. In January 2019, our Client requested an expansion to this support to cover Event Risk Assessments (ERA’s). Despite a hiatus during the pandemic when there was a hold on events taking place, we estimate that since 2019 over 120 event risk assessments have now been completed.
Our role originally involved a consultant completing remote risk assessing for events that were taking place in the Client’s main event space at their head office in Reading. However, more recently, the Client has begun offering their employees the opportunity to volunteer up to 40 of their working hours a year for external causes they are interested in, and so this broadened our scope significantly.
The role of our EHS Consultants in delivering ERA’s included liaising with the event organisers to ensure all risks have been identified and controlled as far as possible. Our consultants are responsible for ensuring event hosts with no prior H&S knowledge understand what needs to happen during the event to keep everyone safe.
Contract Challenges
As our Client’s EHS provider, it’s our job to determine if events are safe to go ahead. The employees who take part in events involving charities are particularly passionate about what they are doing. Ensuring we clearly communicate with our Client and their employees about the risks involved is essential to enabling them to understand when events need to be delayed or revised due to potential risk.
The approach our team take with these assessments is to do everything we possibly can to ensure events are able to proceed. We have only ever had to say no to one event, as it was deemed far too risky even after our support.
Some events are so unique, we are required to think about and assess unusual risks that are not readily dealt with such as assessing the probability of the employee taking part in the Sahara Rally and potentially getting a snake bite!
Our Solution
Our ERA’s now additionally cover charitable volunteering opportunities and mentoring schemes, as well as one off events. We have expanded our support to cover the whole of the UK, an extensive addition to cover more employees beyond the client’s head office location.
Working closely with the client team, particularly the site’s EHS representative, our team identified potential environmental and health & safety risks associated with the events and provided:
- Completing up to five event risk assessment per week on average
- Supporting the client with an area new to them i.e. volunteering
- Providing practical solutions to enable events to go ahead in a safe manner
- Educating the client’s employees in key H&S principles
Our development in our ERA’s have facilitated us to complete assessments for events such as an employee taking part in a rally in the Sahara Desert, employees volunteering at a triathlon especially aimed at those with disabilities and a group of employees rebuilding some external steps at a National Trust site.
