Practical, no fluff
Do I really need health & safety paperwork if it's just me and one other person?
Short answer: you need to think about health and safety from the moment someone else works for you. Whether you have to write it all down is a different question — and the honest answer is “it depends on how many people you employ.”
Here’s the bit nobody explains properly.
The line is five people
The law that matters here is the Health and Safety at Work Act and the regulations under it. Two things kick in once you employ five or more people:
You must have a written health and safety policy — a short statement of how you keep people safe and who’s responsible for what. And you must record the significant findings of your risk assessments — the real hazards, who could be hurt, and what you do about them.
Under five people, those written duties don’t legally apply. That surprises a lot of owners, and it’s worth being clear about: it does not mean health and safety doesn’t apply to you. It means you don’t have to put it on paper.
You still have to actually do it.
What you have to do, whatever your size
Even if it’s just you and one other person, you have a legal duty to keep that person safe “so far as is reasonably practicable” — which is a lawyer’s way of saying do the sensible things a reasonable person would do. You have to look at what could hurt someone, and deal with it. That’s a risk assessment, whether it lives in a folder or just in your head.
The difference is that a two-person outfit can carry a lot of that in their head. A five-person one can’t — too many people, too many moving parts, too easy for something to be assumed rather than agreed. So the law says: write it down.
Our honest advice? Write it down anyway, even if there are only two of you. Not because an inspector will ask — they usually won’t, at your size — but because the day something goes wrong is the day you’ll wish you had a dated piece of paper showing you’d thought about it. A risk assessment isn’t there to satisfy a bureaucrat. It’s there to protect the person doing the work, and to protect you if there’s ever a claim.
The bits people forget
Two things trip up small employers far more often than the written-policy rule, and neither depends on how many staff you have.
Employers’ liability insurance. The moment you employ someone — even one person, even part-time, even a family member in most cases — you almost certainly need employers’ liability insurance, by law, with a minimum cover of £5 million. Not having it can cost you a fine for every day you’re uninsured. This one genuinely catches people out, because it feels like something only “proper” companies need. It isn’t.
Reporting serious accidents. If someone has a serious accident at work — a bad injury, certain “dangerous occurrences”, or worse — you may have to report it to the HSE under rules known as RIDDOR. Most small businesses will go years without ever needing to. But knowing the duty exists, so you’re not scrambling on the worst day, is the whole point.
So, what should you actually do?
If it’s just you and one other person, you’re not drowning in legal paperwork — despite what a scary consultant might tell you. Do the honest version:
Look at the real risks in what you do — the ladder, the hot works, the lone drive home, the chemicals under the sink — and sort the serious ones. Write a short risk assessment even though you technically don’t have to; it takes an hour and it’s the single most useful bit of paper you’ll own. Make sure you’ve got employers’ liability insurance if you employ anyone. And keep it under review, because your work changes and so does the law.
If you’ve grown to five or more, the written policy and recorded risk assessments stop being optional. That’s the moment to get them properly in place — not a fortnight after an inspector asks.
None of this needs to be frightening or expensive. Health and safety for a small business isn’t about laminated posters and jargon; it’s about not letting the people who work for you get hurt doing ordinary work, and being able to show you took it seriously. Do that, and you’ve done the important part.
BossKit builds plain-English health & safety documents — risk assessments, policies and the rest — written for real small businesses, not for lawyers. If you’d rather spend the hour on the job than on the wording, have a look at the packs. We’ve done the thinking; you just add your details.
This post is general guidance, not legal advice, and the law can change — always check the current position for your business and nation (Scotland and Northern Ireland differ in places).