A lone worker policy is the document that sets out how an organisation keeps people safe when they work by themselves without close or direct supervision. It records who counts as a lone worker, what the risks are, the procedures that control them, and who is responsible for each part.
Does UK law require a policy?
Not by name. No regulation says "you must have a lone worker policy", and lone working itself is legal. What the law does require is the outcome a policy exists to produce. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 places a duty of care on employers for the safety of their staff, and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require a risk assessment covering lone working, with the significant findings recorded in writing wherever an organisation has five or more employees.
In practice, a written policy is how employers demonstrate those duties are met. The HSE's guidance for employers, Protecting lone workers (INDG73), expects risks to be managed before anyone works alone, and covers training, supervision and how workers are monitored. If an incident ever reaches an investigation, the policy and the risk assessments behind it are the first documents asked for. The full picture of employers' duties is on the legal responsibilities page.
What a lone worker policy should include
Length is not the goal. A short policy that staff have read beats a long one nobody opens. These are the sections that do the work:
- Purpose and scope. Who the policy covers, including contractors and anyone working from home, and what counts as lone working in your organisation. Delivery drivers, engineers on call-outs and a receptionist alone in a building are all in scope if no one is close enough to help.
- Risk assessment. How lone working risks are assessed, by whom, and where the findings live. The policy points at the assessments; it does not replace them.
- Responsibilities. Named roles, not just "management": who approves lone working, who reviews assessments, what workers themselves must do.
- Communication and check-ins. The contact routine for each type of lone work: scheduled check-in calls, buddy arrangements, or monitored devices with an SOS function. State what happens when a check-in is missed, step by step, with times.
- Emergency procedure. How a worker raises an alarm, who responds, and how escalation reaches the emergency services. If you use a monitored service, this is where the alarm receiving centre and its police-response route are described.
- Training. What lone workers are trained on before working alone (the procedures above, plus role risks such as conflict de-escalation for public-facing staff) and how new starters are supervised until then.
- Incident reporting. Where incidents and near misses are logged, and how they feed back into the risk assessment.
- Review. When the policy is next reviewed, who owns the review, and the triggers that bring it forward.
Download the template
The template below contains every section above with guidance notes in place of each one. It is a Word document, free, and there is no sign-up. Replace the notes with your own arrangements and delete what does not apply. It was prepared by Vatix, who manage this site.
Download the lone worker policy template (Word)
Important: A template is a starting structure, nothing more. The content must come from your own risk assessments. Two organisations in the same sector can need genuinely different policies because their sites, hours and staffing differ.
How to write yours
The sequence that works, whether you start from the template or from scratch:
- List every role and situation where someone works without close or direct supervision. Include the occasional cases: the early starter, the person locking up, home visits.
- Pull the existing risk assessments for those roles, or write them now. The policy summarises their controls; it cannot precede them.
- Decide the check-in routine and emergency route for each situation, and name who responds at each step. Test the missed check-in procedure before you publish it.
- Name the owners: policy owner, assessment reviewers, and who authorises new lone working arrangements.
- Consult the people who actually work alone. They know where the procedure fails on a wet Friday evening.
- Publish, brief every lone worker, and record that the briefing happened. Set the review date at the same time.
Keeping the policy current
Review the policy at least annually, and sooner when something changes: an incident or near miss, a new role that involves working alone, new equipment or monitoring arrangements, or a change in premises or hours. The best practices guide covers the operating side of this, from check-in discipline to training refreshers. A dated review history at the top of the document is worth having; it shows the policy is maintained rather than filed.