A lone worker risk assessment is the documented process of identifying what could harm someone working without close or direct supervision, judging how serious the outcome would be with no one nearby to help, and deciding the controls. It is required by the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999.
The legal basis
The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require every employer to make a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks their employees face. Where an organisation has five or more employees, the significant findings must be recorded in writing. Nothing in the regulations exempts lone working; the HSE's guidance, Protecting lone workers (INDG73), treats the assessment as the mechanism that decides whether working alone is acceptable for a task at all. The wider duties sit on the legal responsibilities page.
The five steps
The HSE's long-standing method applies, with lone working sharpening each step:
- Identify the hazards. The task hazards first, then the lone working overlay: the risks that change when no one is nearby, from aggression on home visits to a fall with nobody watching.
- Decide who might be harmed and how. List the actual people and situations, including the occasional cases: the early starter, the person locking up, weekend call-outs, staff working from home.
- Evaluate the risks and decide on controls. For each situation, judge severity on the honest assumption that help is not within shouting distance, then choose controls in order: remove the lone element where the risk demands it, reduce the hazard, and put reliable communication and alarm arrangements around what remains.
- Record the significant findings. Required in writing at five or more employees, and worth doing at any size, because the record is the evidence the duty was met.
- Review and update. On a set date, and immediately after an incident, a near miss, a new lone working role or a change of premises, equipment or hours.
The lone-working questions
A generic assessment becomes a lone worker assessment when it answers these, for each situation, in writing:
- Can this task be done safely by one person at all? A small set of high-risk activities cannot, and the assessment is where that gets decided.
- How does the worker summon help if they are threatened, injured or taken ill, including when they cannot speak or press anything?
- How would anyone know if the worker failed to return or check in, and how quickly?
- Is there reliable signal everywhere the work happens, and what covers the dead zones?
- Is the worker medically fit for the task alone, and trained for the specific risks, including de-escalation where the public is involved?
Choosing controls
Controls follow severity. Check-in procedures and buddy arrangements cover the low end. Where the assessment finds a credible emergency scenario, the control that changes outcomes is a monitored alarm: an SOS the worker can raise discreetly, automatic man down detection where incapacitation is the risk, and a 24/7 alarm receiving centre that escalates to protocol. Whether that service should be audited against BS 8484:2022 is answered by the same finding: if the police might ever be needed, the audited route is the one that reaches them fast. The options are compared in the solutions guide.
Recording and review
Write the findings into the format your organisation already uses, put the resulting arrangements into the lone worker policy, and diarise the review. The assessment and the policy reference each other: the assessment holds the reasoning, the policy holds the rules people follow. When an incident happens, both documents are read together, in that order.