.svg){kind=icon}
.svg){kind=icon}
Running a charity comes with a lot of responsibilities, and health and safety is an important one to prioritise. But many charities are stretched, both for time and resources. As a result, health and safety often sits with non-specialists who don’t fully always understand the scope of their responsibilities or what’s expected of them.
This guide explains how charities can manage health and safety in their organisation, covering information for employees, volunteers, and the general public. We’ll share checklists, charity-specific regulations, and the tools you need to achieve health and safety compliance.
Skip to:
-
Charity health and safety in remote, hybrid, or lone work environments
-
FAQs about health and safety for charities and the voluntary sector
What are the legal health and safety duties for charities in the UK?
If your charity employs staff, you're an employer in the eyes of the law. The same core health and safety duties that apply to any UK business also apply to you.
The foundation of these duties is the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act of 1974. It requires employers to protect people from harm "so far as is reasonably practicable." This doesn’t mean you’ll be able to eliminate every possible risk, but you should take sensible steps to reduce them, based on the level of risk involved.
This health and safety legislation applies to everyone affected by your charity work, not just your employees. Under the Act, you also have a legal duty to protect any charity volunteers and members of the public from risks caused by your work.
Key health and safety regulations for charities and voluntary organisations
The HSWA is supported by a number of more specific regulations, each covering particular workplace risks or activities. These are the ones most likely to be relevant to your charity.
|
Health and safety regulation |
What it means in practice |
|
Requires employers to carry out formal risk assessments, appoint a competent person and provide appropriate health and safety training. |
|
|
Sets minimum standards for your working environment, covering lighting, temperature, ventilation, toilets and rest areas. |
|
|
Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations (PUWER) 1998 |
Requires your staff’s equipment to be safe, suitable and properly maintained. |
|
Applies wherever people lift, carry or move loads, which is common in charity shops, warehouses and care settings. |
|
|
Display Screen Equipment (DSE) Regulations 1992 |
Covers anyone regularly using computers or screens, including home workers. |
|
Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) 2002 |
Becomes relevant if your charity uses cleaning products or other hazardous substances. |
|
Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR) 2013 |
Requires you to report certain work-related deaths, specified injuries, occupational diseases and dangerous occurrences to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE,) including injuries to volunteers and members of the public taken to hospital. |
What does health and safety look like day to day in a charity?
If you feel overwhelmed by the volume of health and safety regulations involved in running a charity, it helps to understand what they mean in your everyday work. Here are the main points to focus on.
Governance and ownership
Effective health and safety requires the following essential components.
Health and safety policy
Every charity with employees must have a health and safety policy, and if you have five or more staff you must document this in writing. Crucially, the policy should reflect how and where your people work, which might include office work, charity shops, home visits, and fundraising events. Review it regularly and update it when something significant changes.
Clear ownership
Trustees and the overall charity hold legal responsibility for health and safety. The board must make sure the right systems and people are in place, even if they're not managing it day to day. You're also required to appoint a competent person to manage health and safety.
In a charity operating across multiple sites or projects, think carefully about who owns health and safety at each location or programme area. Remember to name these responsibilities explicitly so there’s no space for confusion.
Staff and volunteer involvement
Health and safety works best when it's part of the fabric of your charity. Simple, regular touchpoints, such as team meetings, feedback channels, or a standing agenda item with volunteers help you spot risks early and make everyone feel responsible for safety rather than just subjected to it.
Risk assessments for common charity scenarios
As part of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, all employers are legally required to carry out risk assessments. A risk assessment is simply a careful look at:
-
What could cause harm in your workplace
-
Who might be affected
-
What you can do to reduce the risk
These assessments should be carried out by someone with the knowledge to identify relevant risks, usually your competent person, a manager, or an external adviser.
Next, they should be reviewed whenever something significant changes, such as after an incident, a change in working practices, or a move to a new location.
If you have five or more employees, you must record your findings in writing.
Here are some of the most common scenarios to consider in your risk assessments.
-
Charity shops are one of the most common environments that charities should plan for. Key risks include slips and trips on the shop floor, manual handling in stock rooms, lone working during early or late shifts, and safely sorting donated goods.
-
Fundraising events bring their own set of challenges, particularly around crowd management, unpredictable weather, temporary structures and equipment. You should also assess how to supervise volunteers who may be unfamiliar with the venue or their responsibilities on the day.
-
Home visits and outreach work put staff and volunteers in environments you can't fully control. Lone working is the main concern here, alongside travel safety, unpredictable situations, and protecting people either visiting or being visited.
-
Early years and care settings carry a higher level of risk than most other charity environments. Remember to consider the physical safety, emotional wellbeing, and the vulnerability of people in your care.
Volunteers, beneficiaries, and the public
Your duty of care extends beyond your paid staff. Here's what to keep in mind for the other people your charity works and interacts with.
-
Volunteers should receive clear instructions, adequate training, and any equipment they need before they start. They should also be properly supervised, particularly if they're new or taking on tasks that carry any level of risk.
-
Beneficiaries and vulnerable people require particular thought. Safeguarding and emotional wellbeing aren't separate from health and safety. So, if your charity works with people who have additional needs, whether physical, emotional, or cognitive, your risk assessments should include those.
-
Members of the public who interact with your charity in shops, at events, or in community spaces are also your responsibility. Keeping public areas safe and well-maintained with clear signposts is a basic but important part of managing risk in any public-facing setting.
A health and safety checklist for charity leaders: Where to start
Work through the following health and safety checklist to get a clear picture of where your charity stands on health and safety, and where to focus your energy first. You don't need to tackle everything at once; instead, use it to identify your biggest gaps and prioritise from there.
Sense-check where you are now
Start by gathering the following documents to understand what health and safety information you already have. If any are missing crucial information, or are out of date, start filling the gaps as a priority.
-
Health and safety policy
-
Risk assessments (for each relevant setting, such as office, shop, events, outreach)
-
Incident and near-miss log
-
Training records
-
DSE assessments
-
Emergency procedures and evacuation plan
-
Equipment maintenance records
-
RIDDOR reports (if any incidents have already happened)
Clarify roles and responsibilities
Focus on “who” is involved in your processes.
-
Confirm who owns health and safety at trustee and leadership level
-
Confirm who manages it day to day across shops, projects and offices
-
Make sure you’ve documented and communicated those responsibilities
Prioritise your core risk assessments
The risk assessments you should focus on are specific to your type of charity and the work you do. For example, you won’t need a lone or remote working assessment if you only run a charity shop, with no scope to work from home, and multiple staff on-site at any given time.
-
General workplace safety
-
Shops and venues
-
Fundraising events
-
Lone and remote working
-
Home visits and outreach
Make incident and hazard reporting easy
Your charity workers and volunteers can only report incidents correctly if they know what to do.
-
Check all staff and volunteers know how to report incidents
-
Make sure your reporting process is simple enough that people will use it
-
Confirm you’re capturing near misses as well as major incidents and accidents
Build health and safety into onboarding and training
Get it right from the beginning by combining health and safety with employee induction.
-
Health and safety induction completed for all new starters
-
DSE assessment completed for desk-based and remote workers
-
Periodic refresher training scheduled
-
Keep dated records of who has completed health and safety training
Review, learn, and improve health and safety training
The best health and safety practices provide you with clues about what’s working well and what needs more attention.
-
Review policies and risk assessments regularly
-
Trigger reviews after incidents, or when activities or locations change
-
Collect staff and volunteer feedback to make small improvements over time
How does remote, hybrid, and lone working impact health and safety in charities?
Charities often operate across a range of settings, including offices, homes, community spaces, and everywhere in between. Whatever that looks like for your organisation, your duty to protect the people who work and volunteer for you applies across all of them. Here's what to focus on.
Set up home workspaces safely
Anyone working regularly from home should complete a DSE assessment. That means checking their screen, chair, posture and lighting, making sure they're taking regular breaks, and having access to any equipment they need to work comfortably and safely.
Manage lone working risks actively
Whether someone is working from home or out in the community, have a clear check-in process in place. This might be a simple end-of-day message, a buddy system, or a more structured lone working protocol for higher-risk visits. Don't forget about mental health; isolation and emotionally demanding work are real risks for lone workers in the charity sector.
Know when accidents need to be reported
Accidents that happen while someone is working from home or carrying out work-related activities in the community can still be reportable under RIDDOR. If someone is injured while doing their job, wherever that happens, the same reporting duties apply.
Not sure you’re checking all the right compliance boxes? Download our working from home checklist for SME employers and employees.
Why is joined-up HR and health and safety important in charities and voluntary organisations?
It's easy for charities to think of health and safety as a self-contained compliance task. Many voluntary organisations manage it using a variety of spreadsheets and email chains, or even paper records that contain vital information.
And while this might be part and parcel of working in busy charities, it can make it harder to stay on top of things. The result is often outdated records and risk assessments that no one got around to completing.
As an alternative, combining health and safety with your HR function gives you a single source of truth for your people data. Keeping HR and health and safety in one, centralised system like Breathe makes things easier to manage. Here’s a quick two-minute explainer of our platform.
Breathe helps you:
-
Keep records up to date across training, incidents, and risk assessments
-
Clarify responsibilities across staff and volunteers
-
Show what health and safety tasks you’ve done when trustees, funders, or insurers ask
-
Reduce admin time for already stretched teams
Learn more about why HR and health and safety are a natural overlap by downloading our detailed guide.
Support charity workers’ health and safety with Breathe
There’s one misconception about health and safety we’d like to address: you don’t need enterprise-grade systems to meet regulations. We understand that charities often don’t have the resources to commit to a huge time or financial investment, and that’s okay.
Charity leaders can revamp their approach to health and safety, simply by:
-
Creating a sensible health and safety policy
-
Defining clear roles and responsibilities
-
Devising fit-for-purpose risk assessments
-
Keeping clear, accurate records
-
Engaging their entire workforce, including volunteers and paid workers
A good place to start is working through the health and safety checklist in this article with your trustees or senior leaders. From there, pick one area to focus on this month, whether that's:
-
Tightening up your risk assessments
-
Improving how you report incidents
-
Reviewing your approach to remote working
Then, take the first step towards banishing your current spreadsheets and paper records. Try Breathe for free to explore how our platform can support health and safety in your charity.
FAQs about health and safety for charities and voluntary organisations
Do charities have to follow health and safety law?
Yes, charities must follow health and safety law, although the type of law depends on whether your charity has employees. If you employ at least one member of staff, the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 applies to you in the same way it applies to any other employer. You have a legal duty to protect your employees and anyone else affected by your work activities, including volunteers and members of the public.
If your charity is entirely volunteer-led with no employees you still have responsibilities under common law. Voluntary organisations have a duty of care to their volunteers and anyone affected by their activities. The HSE is clear on this point in its own volunteering guidance.
Does a charity need a written health and safety policy?
Yes, if your charity employs five or more members of staff, you must write your policy down. If you have fewer than five employees, you don’t need to write anything down, but it’s useful to do so. Your policy should set out:
-
Your approach to managing health and safety
-
Who is responsible for it
-
Your arrangements for managing risk.
You must also share your policy with your employees and update them whenever it changes.
What should a charity risk assessment cover?
A risk assessment should identify:
-
What could cause harm in your charity's working environments
-
Who might be affected
-
What steps you're taking to reduce the risk.
Crucially, it should reflect the daily realities of your charity operations, which may be more complicated than a general office setting. That means covering all the environments your staff and volunteers work in, whether that's a charity shop, a fundraising event, a community space, or someone's home.
If you have five or more employees, you must record your findings in writing.
What are the health and safety risks in charity shops and public-facing settings?
Charity shops and public-facing settings carry a range of common risks. These include:
-
Slips and trips on the shop floor
-
Manual handling in stock rooms
-
Lone working during early or late shifts
-
Safely storing donated goods
-
Crowd management
-
Temporary structures
-
Supervising volunteers
Members of the public in these settings are covered by your duty of care, so keeping spaces safe and well-maintained is an important part of managing risk in any public-facing role.
Health and safety
.png)