Most businesses in the UK will have a Health and Safety (H&S) policy in place, and if you have more than five employees it is a legal requirement to have a documented H&S policy to comply with the Health and Safety at Work Act.
This legal requirement combined with advice from H&S advisers and the HSE has often led to the development of comprehensive H&S policies covering all aspects of health and safety which are effectively an H&S management system.
When companies also formally prepare Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems (OHSMS), it can then lead to some confusion on what needs to be included in the H&S policy which is further compounded when the specific policy requirements detailed in the ISO 45001 standard are also considered.
In many cases, companies end up preparing a Health and Safety Policy Statement for ISO 45001 compliance to sit alongside the Health and Safety Policy that has already been prepared for legal compliance but multiple versions of the same policy can get messy and confusing so should there just be a single H&S policy?
The fundamental issue here is the definition of what a policy is. For many H&S advisers who like to include H&S arrangements including compliance obligations, responsibilities and arrangements in the policy, it effectively becomes a full health and safety management system. This ‘everything-in-a-single document’ approach may work for some small companies but will very quickly become problematic once arrangements and responsibilities become more complicated or when formal management systems are developed which then overlap, duplicate or contradict what is covered by the H&S policy.
To illustrate the various options when preparing an H&S policy the P3 Health & Safety policy currently has 5 different versions available;
- V1 - This version is an ISO 45001 compliant Health & Safety Policy Statement
- V2 - Simple H&S policy statement without ISO 45001 requirements.
- V3 - Combined H&S policy, arrangements and general risk assessment. Sample Data version of this file is available.
- V4 - As -V3, but also including a simple Fire Risk Assessment. Sample Data version of this file is available.
- V5 - Simple H&S policy and arrangements without the General Risk Assessment and Fire Risk Assessment included in the document.
In the UK, the applicable legislation relating to Health and Safety policy requirements is detailed in the Health and Safety at Work Act. and this doesn't actually provide very much or any detail on what should be included and can be summarised as follows;
- Written statement of general policy
- Arrangements for carrying out the policy
- Must be read by all employees
So you're actually free to include what you want in the H&S policy and a short, single page, policy statement that details the overall arrangements is perfectly acceptable.
Published: 15th January 2026
